Investigating Teachers' And Students' Attitudes Towards The Use Of Humour As A Pedagogical Strategy To Motivate Efl Learners

Résumé: This study attempts to investigate teachers' and students' attitudes toward the use of humour in motivating EFL learners in their classrooms to acquire the foreign language. So, in order to check the efficiency of humour and either to confirm or disconfirm the hypothesis two questionnaires were addressed to both EFL teachers and students. Teachers' questionnaire was given to (20) teachers and students' questionnaire was distributed to (70) students at the department of english at the university of Larbi Ben M'Hidi. The finding of both questionnaires revealed that success in learning a foreign language depends mainly on effective and well organized techniques, in addition to other factors that work together in order to build up learners' proficiency and competence in the target language. Incorporating humour in the learning of the foreign language sustains students' motivation and helps them to be active and ready to acquire the language. Besides, the results obtained from the two questionnaires indicate that the majority of EFL teachers and learners agreed on the powerful function of humour in EFL learning. However, few teachers preferred to be in a neutral position because humour may affect negatively the progress of learning. Thus, the hypothesis of the study is confirmed since the majority of the respondents favoured the use of humour to motivate first year EFL learners to learn the language.

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