Entretainment & Humour

Expository essay
Lucia Valentina Moreira Sánchez
CeRP del Este
Language I
Prof. Mauricio de Vasconcellos

Humour. A pedagogical tool for language teaching.

Researchers have shown that laughter is crucial not only to our health but also in
learning. Humour helps keeping students interested and motivated as well as
encouraging less sociable students in language classes to participate, classroom
atmosphere and student-teacher interaction are improved as a consequence of
reducing tension and increasing enjoyment. Moreover, it is an excellent way of
transmitting cultural clues to students making them interculturally competent.

To begin with, laughter works as a relaxing, comforting, and tension reducing

device, it has a humanizing effect on teacher image and maintaining or increasing
students interest, therefore a positive atmosphere is propitiated. This fact is
supported on the fifth Krashen’s hypothesis, his idea states how affective factors
relate to the second language acquisition process by posting that acquirers
success vary with respect to the strength or level of their Affective Filter. For
instance, a motivated, self-confident and non-anxious learner appears to
conduce to optimal acquiring conditions. On contrary, “Those whose attitudes are
not optimal for second language acquisition will not only tend to seek less input,
but they will also have a high or strong Affective Filter” (Stevick, 1976).
Furthermore, a welcoming teaching space for language learning help the shy
students to have more participation as they will not feel threatened nor
intimidated. Kristmanson (2000).

Secondly, despite of the benefits mentioned, many teachers still fear humour in
class as they assume it is equal to losing their authority, therefore the class
control. In my opinion, it is not a matter of being a clown nor comedians, S. Elliot
once said, “Humour is also a way of saying something serious”. The main
purpose is to employee it when it is required, for instance, as an ice-breaker when
communication does not flow properly or as a memory resetting. The attention
span average is of twenty minutes, even less when it is about young learners,
because of this and opposite to the common believe, laughter can act on
educators’ favour in order to keep a good group management. When students
are reaching that limit, a breve joke can take them out of the topic and return them
ready for another round, completely under teacher’s control.

Finally, Deneire (1995) emphasizes the importance of humour teaching culture

alongside language. He points it as an effective mean of indicating the unseen
cultural boundaries. Over and above, Schmitz (2002) believes that classroom
exposure to humour prepares students to understand and react to this pervasive
and authentic element of discourse during real communicative language
interaction. I strongly believe it is a really important reason to bear in mind this
methodology as few courses are focused on making students competent to
understand culture.

To sum up, laughter is a sub estimated tool which can provide multiples benefits
to educators making their job easier, facilitating knowledge to learners at low
affective levels, helping to scaffold unseen competences respecting the variety
of pupils’ conditions and limitations.