Can You Tell a Joke? (Improving Speaking Activities by Using Telling Jokes in ESL Classrooms)

To imagine you as a teacher confront the scene that have asked a question in the classroom and nobody can be able to answer it, what would be happened? The teacher as an instructor in the classroom should determine to liberate students from these situations and find the modern keys to encourage them to talk. The present study attempts to generate a new method of enhancing speaking skills of pre-intermediate level students by using the verbal humor like jokes in Iran. To this goal, eighteen pre-intermediate participants were selected among 54 students based on Oxford Placement Test 2 (Allan, 2004). Pre-test and post-test were similar to each other for collecting the treatment data were carried out. A Paired Sample t Test shows the students on post-test outperformed the pre-test and telling the joke could impact the speaking activity skills by making enjoyable environment and reducing the undesirable stressful events in the ESL classrooms.