A Study On The Effect Of Verbal Humor On The Retention Of English Vocabulary In Senior High School

The central theme of this thesis is the humorous contextualization of English Vocabulary Teaching. This contextualization is usually realized by providing humorous verbal contexts in vocabulary teaching. Contexts in this process play a part of presenting how exactly the words are supposed to be used in language application. However, the contexts created in English classes today are dissatisfactory. It is because the contexts fail to arouse students'interests or reduce the learners'anxiety in foreign language learning. But, humorous contextualization can make the learners"off the defensive"and the affective filter (anxiety) low in order for the input to be noticed and gain access to the learner's thinking (Krashen, 1982). Humor can no doubt help to create such a low-anxiety environment for the foreign language teaching and learning. This thesis has brought to the forefront a focus on humorous contextualization in Foreign Language Vocabulary Teaching.In order to prove the hypothesis that humorous context can lead to better retention effect of vocabulary than the non-humorous contexts. An experiment is conducted in two classes of Grade One in high school with two different sets of contexts to illustrate the same vocabulary. After the experiment, a comparison is made between the results of the two classes and a conclusion is reached that the hypothesis is valid. Therefore, it is believed that it is a great method to enhance the English vocabulary learning by using humorous context in classroom. Since humorous contextualization in English vocabulary learning is very much helpful, this thesis finds its practical significance in shedding light on the idea that English vocabulary teaching could be perfected in this way.This paper also discusses the feeling when the author uses humor in class. It is found that humor can also deepen the learners'cognition of western culture, which can be very helpful for the English understanding. At the same time, it also provides some actual cases, suggestions and the do's and don'ts with humorous teaching.