Using Humor in the English Classroom: The Japanese Students’ Perspective

This paper examines the attitudes and opinions of a sample of students from four different Japanese universities towards their native-speaker English teachers’ use of humor in the classroom. We provide a numerical measure of correlation between the teachers’ frequency of humor use and the resulting student interest and class usefulness, as evaluated by our survey participants. We also identify the types of humor which seem to be most memorable with our Japanese respondents, and offer a brief discussion of possible comedic pitfalls. Estimates of the frequency and success rates of attempted humor use on the part of the students themselves are also given, together with a summary of the students’ views on native English speakers’ sense of humor