Investigating Humor Integration in Tunisian Tertiary English Classes: A Comparative Study of Teachers’ and Learners’ Perceptions

Abstract

This study examines lecturers’ and learners’ perceptions on humor use in Tunisian tertiary classrooms, focusing specifically on the English major. The ultimate aim is to explore the types and frequency of humor use on the one hand and whether teachers regard humor in the same light as their students on the other. To this purpose, a mixed-methods approach consisting of questionnaires and semi-structured interviews is adopted to collect quantitative and qualitative data for analysis. The findings revealed that, in terms of frequency, humor is used by all interviewed teachers irrespective of their gender. Yet, the general percentage of humor use remains moderate and limited to specific oral subjects as confirmed by the students. The results also indicated the participants’ agreement on the efficiency and preference of verbal, spontaneous and relevant humor types. However, it has been shown that the lecturers use a very limited repertoire of humor forms, neglecting jokes which are more appreciated by their students. Inconsistencies between the participants’ responses are further traced at the level of their attitude towards humor use in class. While most of the teachers believe that the merits of humor are undeniable, they expressed skepticism and discomfort in dealing with this tool in class. To overcome these lacunas, this study builds on the students’ recommendations to improve their teachers’ practices and can therefore be a starting point for EFL curriculum designers in Tunisia to revise current materials for a better humor integration in higher education.

A Study on Instructional Humor: How Much Humor Is Used in Presentations?

“…While previous works had different methods to measure humor rates and locate humorous messages [ 13 , 42 , 43 , 44 , 45 , 46 , 47 , 48 ], in our study, we decided to locate the humor instances using the special markup "Laughter" found in the TED Talks transcripts. This markup occurs whenever the audience laughs during the presentations.…”

“…On the other hand, more recent research on instructional humor frequency focuses on self-reported measures. Moreover, frequency counts were obtained via survey forms or ratings rather than through actual counts of humor instances [ 45 , 46 , 47 , 48 ]. However, using self-reported measures yields lower rates of instructional humor [ 30 ].…”

“…Previous research has focused on self-reported methods [ 45 , 46 , 47 , 48 ] and offline settings [ 13 , 42 , 43 , 44 ] for calculating instructional humor frequency. This research is unique as we use corpora from online media (TED Talks and user-submitted jokes) and conducted the analysis using NLP techniques to better understand the context in a digital age.…”