The Effect of Teacher’s Sense of Humor on Developing Vocabulary Knowledge among EFL Learners of Language Institute

Humor is a fundamental pedagogical tool that EFL teachers can utilize in the classroom to maximize their effectiveness. Furthermore, humor in pedagogy is a basic tool that can help teachers to create a motivating atmosphere in class to enhance student learning (Hismanoglu, ۲۰۱۸). This study was an attempt to investigate the effect of teacher’ sense of humor on EFL learners' vocabulary development. It further tried to find out the possible difference between male and female students' views on learning vocabulary by using teacher’s sense of humor. To this end, ۶۰ Iranian EFL learners of both genders (۳۰ male &۳۰ female) in a language institute of Rafsanjan were selected as the participants of the current study. They were elementary EFL learners that were selected based on available sampling. To explore the objectives of this study, a valid and reliable questionnaire was employed by the researcher and SPSS software version ۲۴ was used for analyzing and interpreting data. The results of descriptive analysis indicated positive effects of teacher’s sense of humor on EFL students’ vocabulary knowledge. On the whole, the participants’ overall satisfaction towards teacher’s sense of humor was achieved by this study. Additionally, based on the result of inferential statistics, no difference was observed between male and female students' views on learning vocabulary by using teacher’s sense of humor. It is worthy to note that the findings of this research can provide the students and teachers with evidence that sense of humor could be used to improve English students' vocabulary knowledge.

Keywords:

EFL Learners , Humor , Teacher’s Sense of Humor , Vocabulary Knowledge