Humour Between The Students' Attitudes And Teachers' Beliefs: A Non-zero-sum Game At The Algerian Advanced Efl Classroom

Résumé: Humour is probably among the most authentic and universal speech acts in people’s everyday discourses. The primary aim of this study is to investigate university EFL learners’ perceived benefits of using humour in the classroom. 109 second-year Master’s students, enrolled in the University of Tlemcen at the department of English, participated in the study, in addition to 5 of their teachers. Both samples were solicited through normative and meta-cognitive approaches using two instruments, the questionnaire and in-depth interviews respectively. However, inferential analysis, using ANOVA (f) Test, indicated that female students were more positive than their male peers. In contrast, the teachers’ beliefs consolidate the students’ attitudes despite the emerged new themes during the interviews. The findings significantly support and attest the pre-existing theories about the multifaceted benefits of using humour in the EFL teaching-learning process. This study belongs to the scant number of studies that draw attention to the potential benefits of using humour in Algerian education in general, and EFL classroom in particular. Accordingly, the results encourage EFL practitioners for the systemic implementation of humour, not least humour of the target language. Furthermore, the findings yielded pedagogical implications that recommend further investigation of such phenomenon through more experimental-based methodologies.

Publié dans la revue: مجلة الآداب و اللغات