Dr. Fatemeh Behjat & Mohammad Ali Zahiri Doost
Abadeh Branch, Islamic Azad University, Abadeh, Iran
In every community, people believe that using humor can help people to have a good relationship with others and be more relaxed in different situations. This research was an attempt to explore a new way by which students and people can get interested in reading English texts. One of the main objectives of this study was to explore if telling and reading jokes in English can help students improve their reading comprehension. It is also an attempt to find out the possible role of humor in the enhancement of EFL learners’ vocabulary knowledge. The participants of this study were 50 young students of English as a foreign language. They were at the intermediate level at the time of treatment. This sample was selected based on random sampling technique from among one hundred participants. Tests of vocabulary and reading comprehension were used as the instruments. This study was held over a period of in 12 sessions, two sessions in a week for each group. The pretest aimed at testing the students’ background knowledge of reading comprehension and vocabulary knowledge level. Humor was used from the fourth week of the treatment procedure for the experimental group. At the end, it was concluded that humor and jokes have a positive effect on learners’ reading comprehension and vocabulary knowledge. It is hoped that this research can help teachers to use more humor in teaching English.
The above abstract is a part of the article which was accepted at The Second International Conference on Current Issues of Languages, Dialects and Linguistics (WWW.TLLL.IR), 1-2 February 2018, Ahwaz.
