The Research On Humor In English Teaching

Teaching is an art full of regret, while at the same time it is also surmounting art eliminating regret. Teaching is an art, but the art of class teaching is idiographic demonstration of teaching art. Only when the teachers make full use of each class and perform the tasks of each class wonderfully, can the charm of the art be shown. For many years, we have been exploring different kinds of teaching patterns of triggering the students'interests in English and enhancing the efficiency of teaching and have been seeking different kinds of approaches to optimizing the process of class teaching. So many kinds of English teaching methods, such as five-step teaching method and task-based method, are put forward but these methods pay more attention to imparting new knowledge to students than to training their ability to use English and to triggering their interests in English. Many students think that they are forced to learn English for different examinations and tasks. As a result, teachers try their best to improve students' ability to use English, but there are few results. In this thesis, the purposes that the author wants to explore this research are to arouse the students' interests and to decrease the students'psychological pressure, to let the students experience the joy of learning English in a relaxing atmosphere in order to reach the final goal of improvement on the students'ability. In this case, the introduction of humor into class is an effective means to arrive at the target. As Xiao Sa says in his book Humor Psychology,"when people tend to have humorous thinking, their inspiration is easier to exert."[1] 45 And 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. So humor in their teaching plays an important role, and has a great reflection on the classroom effect and efficiency. Therefore, we believe that it is a great method to enhance the learning's English study by using humor in classroom in some efficient ways. In the English teaching practice, Chinese teachers and students shouldn't have neglected the effect of humor in daily English study. 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 humor for English teaching and to discuss some effective methods. Since humor in English learning 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, and gaining a better effect on English study. The thesis finally points out that, humor in English teaching is still difficult to understand and vary from person to person, based on the semantic and pragmatic analyses of the laughter-eliciting internal and external mechanism of verbal humor in addition to the utilization of the general theories of humor language to analyze point-by-point and the introduction to some cognitive models and culture features, English learners will have fewer difficulties in English study.