The Research On The Impact Of Humorous Teaching On Language Anxiety

With a shift of the research focus of second language acquisition from the part of theteacher to that of the learner, more and more people realized that human aspect of languageteaching has an important effect on second language acquisition, learner’s own personalityand the interaction between teacher and learner matters more than teaching method.According to Krashen’s Affective Filter Hypothesis, in second language learning process,learners are influenced by affective factors, among which, anxiety is considered one of themost destructive obstacles that hinders language learners from achieving their greatestpotential.Anxiety is a subjective feeling of nervousness, worry, apprehension, and the tense ofanticipation of a threatening event. Language anxiety is the anxiety that would be aroused inthe process of language learning which is implemented in the classroom, some researchersestimated that of all the university students, up to half of them had suffered from the differentlevels of language anxiety, therefore, it is urgent for teachers to create an environment wherelearners are“off the defensive”and the level of anxiety is low for receiving input.Humor is no doubt an effective means for creating a low anxiety environment. However,for a long time, humor used in English teaching is mainly for fun, and few researches havebeen conducted to study humor from the angle of relieving learner’s language anxiety.By comparing the opinions between college students and college English teacher’attitudes, several findings are found in this survey: both students and teachers are hold apositive attitude toward the effect of humorous teaching on relieving students’languageanxiety; compared with College English teachers, students have a higher acceptance ofhumorous teaching; besides, students whose English teachers are good at incorporate humorinto English teaching are more likely to accept this perception. At last, this paper proposes several suggestions on how to use humor effectively andproperly in English teaching, let the students experience the joy of learning in a relaxingatmosphere to reach the final goal of improvement on the students’ability.