Using humorous stories as supplementary materials in the teaching of reading comprehension at SMU

Reading ability proves to be given primary emphasis to broaden students’ knowledge in coping with the progress of science and technology which is essential for the development of our country. In addition, reading skills are also the foundation of all intellectual progress and for the advancement of learning. In accordance with the 1994 English curriculum, the foremost and ultimate goal of teaching English at SMU in Indonesia is to make SMU graduates have reading ability that enables them to comprehend information from English written texts well. However, in reality, most SMU students still have many difficulties in comprehending English texts. Moreover, they often get bored with the reading texts in their textbook. The writer is interested in Calcemurcia’s opinion about introducing variety into learning activities that can motivate the students to learn and make the class less routine and more enjoyable. That is why, this study is intended to suggest the kinds of humorous stories a teacher should give as supplementary materials in reading class and the steps a teacher should use to teach these materials. Reading comprehension involves bottom-up and top-down processing in which readers comprehend the text by analyzing it in small pieces, building meanings from the units of knowledge structure, and bring their pre-existing knowledge. In order to help the students comprehend the text, they should be taught several reading comprehension skills such as, vocabulary recognition and paragraph analysis. The ability of the students to comprehend the reading texts does not only depend on the reading comprehension skills, but also the factors that influence them in reading such as interest, motivation and reading environment. The teaching of reading comprehension involve a two-stage process, that is pre-teaching or preparation stage and comprehension stage which includes skimming and scanning. In pre-teaching stage, advance organizer is used to give the students prior knowledge before reading the text. Comprehension stage involves skimming and scanning process in which the students use their reading skills to search quickly for general idea and specific information in order to comprehend the text totally. To check the students; comprehension on the text, teacher develops a variety of exercises whose sole aim is enhancing reading skills. The ability to appreciate and enjoy humor is universal and shared by all people independently of their age, sex, socio-economic status, or culture. Humor provides laughter, fun, entertainment, and emotional participation. However, it is sometimes difficult to be understood. People may understand every line of a humorous story but they may not see what is funny about it. This can often happen because humor is culturally based. What one country finds funny, another country may not find so at all. Thus, humor must be universal. It is not successful if the situation depicted is too culture-specific. A sender and a recipient should share the same knowledge in order for a joke to be understood. Humor is influenced by seven factors such as speaker and hearer, stimulus, experience, situation, socio-economic status, linguistic competence, and culture. Based on its form, humor is divided into three namely, verbal humor, textual humor, and body movement or gesture humor. Textual humor has five forms. They are one line joke, two-lines joke, short text joke, humor column, and literally humor. Humor supports the success of the teaching learning process. Besides, humor brings a lot of advantages to the teaching of reading. There are a lot of humorous stories but not all of them can be given to the students. That is why, teacher should select the humorous story first before giving it to the students. In the teaching of reading comprehension using humorous stories, the writer applies three phases of reading instructional activities namely, pre reading, whilst reading, and post reading. Before teaching, she does some preparations such as, finding suitable and interesting humorous story. Culturally humorous stories are recommended to be used as supplementary materials in teaching of reading comprehension at SMU. The suggestion is under consideration that culturally humorous stories are not only able to motivate the students to read but also give them cultural knowledge. The students can make use of some good points in Western culture that may be valuable for their lives. Besides, in story telling activity, the students can practice their speaking and become more self-confident in expressing themselves in front of others. The students also learn how to work in groups and solve the problems given by the teacher together with their friends. It is useful for their social lives. By giving humorous stories as supplementary reading materials, teacher motivates the students to read, improves their reading speed, increases their vocabulary, and broaden their knowledge