The Impact of Teachers’ Use of Humor-based InstructionalVideos on Iranian Students’ Perceptions and Language Learning

The present study investigated the effect of humor-based instructional videoson Iranian junior high school students’ language learning and explored thestudents’ perception of the role of humor in language learning and theirresponses to teachers’ use of humor. This study was a quasi-experimentalresearch with a pretest, posttest, and control group design. First, the OxfordPlacement Test (OPT) was administered to grade-seven students and twohomogeneous classes out of three classes were selected. The students in thetwo classes were of the same age (13-14 years old). One class served as theexperimental group (n = 20) and the other as the control group (n = 20). Afterthat, a proficiency test taken from the book Cambridge English for schoolsStarter Tests was administered to both groups as a pretest. Next,Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) was applied to teach both groupsfour themes from the textbook Cambridge English for Schools StarterStudent's Book . The experimental class received an extra treatment by beingexposed to humor-based instructional video episodes in each session. After 12eighty-minute sessions of treatment, the Cambridge proficiency test wasadministered to both groups as a posttest. Two weeks later, a surprise delayedposttest (the same Cambridge proficiency test) was given to both groups tocompare students’ long-term recall of the learned material. Just after thedelayed posttest, the experimental group was surveyed by a 19-itemquestionnaire. The goal was to find the experimental group's perceptions ofthe role of humor and their teacher's use of humor in the course. Finally, thedata gathered from the posttest and the delayed posttest was analyzed throughan Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) and the distribution of students'responses to each item in the questionnaire was provided in the form ofpercentages. The results revealed that students in the experimental groupoutperformed the control group on the posttest and the delayed posttest,confirming that the use of humor-based instructional videos had a significanteffect on students’ language learning, that students in the experimental groupgained a longer memory of the practiced material and that students hadpositive views about teachers’ use of humor in class and the role of humor inlearning.

Keywords:

Humor , video instruction , perception , CLT