The Effects of Telling Jokes on Word Perception in Iranian EFL Classrooms

What do you do to make your classroom funnier during teaching a foreign language? Everybody can answer this question according to his/her experiences and abilities, but if you want to be honest, many teachers, especially in our country, never think about this question. Classroom discourse as the different types of written and spoken communication that happen in the classroom, which is concerned in the current study should donate convenient sense to learners for improving language elements learning. To this goal, teachers tried to apply verbal humour like jokes in the classroom discourse while teaching new subjects to make the environment funnier, hence two pre-intermediate groups of 18 pupils were selected randomly among 54 students according to their scores on Oxford Placement Test 2 (Allan, 2004). Having taken a pre-test to assign vocabulary knowledge, the experimental group in which students tell jokes themselves in front of the classroom while the control group just listen to their teacher who tells jokes themselves. After treatment, a post-test, similar to the pre-test, was carried out and data was analysed via an Independent Sample t-test which indicated both groups progressed during the treatment but the experimental group which students were more active than the teacher outperformed the control group, therefore converting a classroom to an enjoyable environment especially applying funny stories can lead to a comfortable classroom discourse that learning a foreign language is fascinated for all learners.