This study examines lecturers' and learners' perceptions on humor use in Tunisian tertiary classrooms, focusing specifically on the English major. The ultimate aim is to explore the types and frequency of humor use on the one hand and whether teachers regard humor in the same light as their students on the other. To this purpose, a mixed-methods…

Faculty members in a College of Education responded to a mixed methods questionnaire regarding their attitudes toward the use of humor as a pedagogical tool. Quantitative data and coding of open response questions revealed that instructors overall considered humor to be an integral part of their teaching plan and that humor relaxes students,…

The KSA has become a popular country for Americans to work as an EFL teacher in the recent years because of the payment and cultural experience (Hastings, 2012). Due to the wide social distance between the KSA and USA, the teachers had to adapt to the expectation and become legitimate participants (Lave and Wenger, 1991) in the local communities.…

In this article, we interpreted, in light of Mezirow's theory of transformative learning, interviews with 13 educators regarding their work with marginalized adult learners in prisons in the northeastern United States. Transformative learning may have been aided by the educators' response to unplanned activating events, humor, and respect, and…

It has been argued that humour is beneficial in the classroom because it increases social bonding between teachers and students, salience of information, and ultimately recall and retention. The current study attempts to test some assumptions about humour as a pedagogical tool. Results have indicated that using humour to teach material…

Humour is a universal phenomenon and has been studied in many fields of research such as literature, linguistics, psychology, sociology and philosophy. Humour is often expressed through language and it is little wonder that failure to understand humorous language causes breakdowns in communication. What is humorous might be culturally defined, and…

A study investigated the hypotheses that: (1) people from different language backgrounds would differ in the jokes they found funny; and (2) the differences would be related to culture rather than lack of vocabulary. A questionnaire with 30 jokes was presented to 51 English teachers from a wide variety of countries and 11 native English-speakers.…

Humor can be an effective element of classroom teaching, serving to reduce tension, increase motivation, aid instruction and strengthen teacher/student relationships. A review of the literature reveals that research in this area is incomplete and inconclusive. This study surveys 5th- and 6th-grade teachers (N=50) for information on how they vary…