Dublin Core
Title
An Analysis of the Impact of Utilizing the Genre of Humour on EFL Learners’ Willingness to Communicate
Abstract
The present study was intended to analyze the impact of utilizing the genre of humour on Iranian EFL learners’ Willingness to Communicate (WTC) in English. To this end, forty participants equally divided into experimental and control groups took part in an experiment. The control subjects were required to participate in oral class discussions, whereas the experimental subjects were scaffolded with humorous anecdotes by Hill (1980) over seven interview sessions, which were geared towards the topics under debate. The content analysis of the transcriptions was carried out through the t test procedure by calculating the relative loading of the Idea Units (IUs) in the data, which Ellis (1984, as cited in, Kamimura & Oi, 2001) has proposed as a measure to examine the students’ communicative strategies in the oral production. Pedagogically, it was found that using texts belonging to the genre of humour augmented the experimental participants’ WTC in the target language in comparison with that of the control subjects since there was a significant difference between the mean scores of the relative loadings of the IUs found in the transcriptions obtained from the segments of talk by the experimental group than those identified in the fragments of talk by the control group.
Keywords
Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed
PeerReviewed
Date
2012-05
Extent
1005