Humor Comprehension In English Reading

Generally speaking, humor is considered the combination and representative of human wisdom and art of a language. Western people, especially the British and the American, are generally regarded as the best producers of humor language. Since humor is an important part of a language that language learners should not neglect it in the language learning, here in this thesis referring to English learning for the Chinese students in particular. On the other side, with the development of the modern linguistic theory of Communicative Competence, both language learning and tests are inclined to master a foreign language in a socially realistic way, which include three component competences: language in itself; language in discourse, or language in textual context; and language in situation. In this way, it is easily seen that humor language in a specific discourse or situation is a good way to improve the language learners' Communicative Competence. However, for a long time in English teaching and testing in China, humor language is, at the most, on the level of language sense enhancement just for fun, partly due to the difficulties in humor comprehension, and partly due to the lack of humor studies and analyses.These reasons lead to the purpose of the thesis, which is to introduce some reading methods for humor language. Since humor comprehension is so helpful but rather difficult in English learning, this thesis founds its practical significance in shedding light on the Chinese English learners for a better understanding of the true meaning and the art of humors. The thesis finally points out that, based on the semantic and pragmatic analyses of humor's features in addition to the introduction to some cognitive reading models, readers will have fewer difficulties in humor comprehension.There are 6 chapters in the thesis. The 1st Chapter gives a brief introduction to the background, purpose and significance of the thesis. Chapter 2 presents the necessary literature review on the historical humor studies. Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 are the focus of the thesis, which have analyzed humor's semantic and pragmatic features and introduced to the Interactive Reading model respectively. Since Chapter 5 has 2 questions to ultimately answer:1. What are the barriers to the full comprehension of humor language?2. How can those barriers be removed?Therefore, a questionnaire study and a case study are conducted in this methodology chapter for both quantitative and qualitative features. Chapter 6 is the natural ending as well as points out the limitations of the thesis.