The Application Of Humor In Senior Middle School English Classes

"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 context, teachers should begin with arousing the students' interests and decreasing the students' psychological pressure, letting the students experience the joy of learning English in a relaxing atmosphere in order to reach the goal of improving 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." As the aim of English teaching in middle schools is not only to improve the students' ability to use English but also more important to hasten the development of students' intelligence, idiosyncrasy and personality.The thesis will be written in the way of exploring, analyzing, giving examples and testing. First of all, a brief introduction of humor, covering the functions and the characteristics of humor, is given to form a foundation of Chapter II, which is about the application of humor in English classes. In chapter II, the theories of pedagogy, psychology and philosophy are used to state the necessity and feasibility of humor in English classes. Moreover, the characteristics, principles and methods of humorous teaching, the types of humorous teaching and the relationship between humor and the factors to affect the students' learning English are in detail discussed in this Chapter. In Chapter III, an experiment is conducted to test the effect of humorous teaching by comparing the traditional teaching method and humorous teaching method. And at last, a conclusion is drawn that the application of humor in English classes is not only available but also effective.The difficult point in this paper is how to seek an ideal joint point between humor and English teaching. The research on humor at home and abroad mainly focuses on humor itself, the application of humor, especially the application of humor in English classes is rarely seen. So in this paper the author attempts to seek a new English teaching method by combining humor and English teaching with the purpose of making English classes more lively.The chief task of English class teaching is to trigger the students' interests, let students study voluntarily and experience the joy of learning English. Besides, teachers should try their best to develop the students' intelligence and enrich their imagination. The author tries to find a good way to better the English class teacher by using humor in order to inspire students to think, to imitate and to be creative.This thesis intends to call for a good understanding of the importance of humorous teaching. Meanwhile, the author hopes it will bring some enlightenment to the English colleagues and heartedly hopes more teachers will join in the research of humor teaching to improve the effect of English class teaching.