Developing pre-service English language teachers’ comprehension of reading texts with humorous elements

Ceylan Yangın Ersanlı, Abdülvahit Çakır

Abstract


Humour is a universal phenomenon and has been studied in many fields of research, namely, literature, linguistics, psychology¸ sociology and philosophy. Humour is often expressed through language. As for language teaching, failure to understand humorous language causes communication breakdown. What is humorous might be culturally defined, and therefore is difficult to define or teach. Yet, people convey too much through humour to be neglected in the language classroom. That is, even if we need not aim at helping our learners find a piece of foreign language funny and laugh at it, we should help them appreciate humour and achieve to see beyond the literal meaning. In other words, pre-service language teachers should be able to get the message conveyed through humorous texts using related sub-skills of reading effectively. This study investigates pre-service English language teachers’ perceptions of humour in English language learning materials and authentic texts and how to improve their comprehension of reading texts with humorous elements with special reference to certain sub-skills of reading comprehension.

Key words: Humour, Foreign language teaching, reading skill, sub-skills of reading, pre-service ELT teachers


Keywords


Key words: Humour, Foreign language teaching, reading skill, sub-skills of reading, pre-service ELT teachers

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References


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