Humour as a pedagogical tool in the teaching of English and German equivocal words
Main Article Content
Abstract
This article proves statistically the effectiveness of humour in the teaching of English and German to Spanish students of foreign languages. The referred lexicon is particularly troublemaking because of the difficulties that such vocabulary poses for Spanish learners of not-Latin-originated languages. The approach followed is a quantitative and contrastive analysis and was carried out with four groups of Spanish learners. The experimental groups (one for each language) were presented with the input they were supposed to learn in sentences and contexts in which the use of the English/German term, with the meaning of its Spanish ‘false friend’, resulted in nonsensical and highly humorous utterances. The presentation of the same lexical items to the control groups was more neutral and deliberately bereft of humour. After that, the participants were set a test to find out whether or not they remembered the proper sense of the lexicon taught and could also use it correctly. The results are conclusive and the outcome strongly supports the beneficial effects of pedagogical humour in the language classroom.
Keywords: Humour, English as a foreign language, German as a foreign language, L2 resources, motivation, vocabulary development.
Downloads
Article Details
Cypriot Journal of Educational Sciences is an Open Access Journal. The copyright holder is the author/s. Licensee Birlesik Dunya Yenilik Arastirma ve Yayincilik Merkezi, North Nicosia, Cyprus. All articles can be downloaded free of charge. Articles published in the Journal are Open-Access articles distributed under a CC-BY license [Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)].
Birlesik Dunya Yenilik Arastirma ve Yayincilik Merkezi (BD-Center)is a gold open-access publisher. At the point of publication, all articles from our portfolio of journals are immediately and permanently accessible online free of charge. BD-Center articles are published under the CC-BY license [Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)], which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and the source are credited.