HUMOR IN CHINESE LANGUAGE CLASSROOM

Abstract

Humor refers to an ability to perceive and express a sense of the clever or amusing. It consists mainly in the recognition and expression of incongruities or peculiarities present in a conversation context or character. Humor is the quality of being funny and is an art of human interaction based on a situation or context. Language teaching and learning involves planning, organizing and practically presenting a learning situation that will raise  the learning ability and interest of students. In addition to language teaching skill, the relationship between teacher and student in the classroom is a principal driver to creating a good language learning environment in the classroom. Austin theorized that language use is the sum total of utterances in speech in specific contexts. This “utterance” of speech is called speech act. Humans use the utterance to do something and affect someone through conversation. In the context of the language classroom, in order to assure the learners learning is fun and interesting, a language teacher’s utterance will definitely be motivated toward the learners. Humor is described as the ‘cream’ of teacher’s speech act. Since humor is describe as the quality of being funny and an art of human interaction based on a context., this paper argues that humor in Chinese language learning optimizes the learners learning interest.