HUMOUR AS USED AND PERCEIVED BY INSTRUCTORS IN EFL TEACHING AT THE UNIVERSITY OF BAHRAIN

This paper attempted to investigate the instructor's perception of humor and its use in the teaching of English as a foreign language at the University of Bahrain (UoB). To that end, a survey was given to 30 native and non-native English speaking instructors in the English Language Centre as well as in the English Department at UoB. The findings revealed that there was an agreement among the instructors in that humour has an undeniable role to play in lowering the affective filter by creating an enjoyable and convenient atmosphere and also in contributing positively to making language learning easier and more effective. This finding clearly supports earlier research in other studies such as Deneire (1995) and Tuncay (2007), among others, which provided evidence about the benefits of the employment of pedagogical humour. However, the participating instructors seemed to be unsure about how humour is to be implemented in English language teaching. Based on the results of the present study and those of other studies make it necessary for course book and material designers acknowledge this benefit of humor, not only for lowering the affective filter but also as a useful language teaching tool of targeted linguistic features. In view of this positive result, which represents only part of the overall picture, there is a need to complete it by further research that examines humour in actual teaching and evaluates its impact on learning of specific language features and on English language learning as a whole.