Written Humorous Texts on Teaching

Extensive amounts of research, opinions, and suggestions exist regarding the teaching of reading skill is by no means exhaustive. Research in cognitive psychology in recent years has emphasized the importance of organized background knowledge in text processing. The focus has been on how knowledge of the world is ordered and used in comprehending texts. The knowledge about text types and an implicit ability to recognize the distinctive ways in which texts are organized is central to comprehension strategies (Hyland, 1992: 14).

A humorous text, as one of the text-types or genres, is to communicate a certain attitude of humor performed by the text. It has the ability to make one feel amused or amusement. It can evoke and make him laugh. It therefore brings about happiness to the readers. However, to understand humorous texts depends on a host of absolute and relative variables including geographical location, culture, maturity, level of education s well as contexts (Raskin, 1985: 1).

As language is closely related to thought, this also means that humor may involve emotion, thought, and action that later can lead to laughter. Still, there is often lack of understanding those kinds of humorous texts, particularly by EFL readers. This may bring about the intermediate plateau they often get stuck on, and which is the main cause of their demotivation. In searching for a solution to this problem, we should approach the humorous texts from various viewpoints. One of them is the genre analysis.

Based on the previous background, the present study is generally intended to empirically examine the nature of the humorous texts, the useful strategies how to teach the texts, and some suggestions for the teachers to improve they way they perform in presenting the texts. Specifically, the study is aimed at investigating the following research questions:

1.      What is the nature of humorous texts in terms of their social functions, generic structure, and lexicogrammatical and socio-cultural features?

2.      How do we present a humorous text in our classroom?

To have the ability to read and understand English texts as an important skill both in English as a Second Language (ESL) and English as a Foreign Language (EFL), the learners should be familiar with different types of texts (genres). Each type of text is composed of different social functions, generic (schematic) structure and lexico-grammatical features. This section addresses the nature of the humorous texts including (a) humorous texts as a narrative text, (b) the social function, (c) the generic structure, (d) the lexicogrammatical features, and (d) the socio-cultural aspects of humorous texts.

A.    Humorous Texts as a Narrative Text

Grabe and Kaplan in McKay (2006: 110) suggested that text researchers began to recognize that a text is a multidimensional construct. Text analysis can help ESL researchers, teachers, and language learners identify rules and principles of written and spoken texts a variety of levels: sentences, sentence relations, and complex texts. This sort of research orientation differs from traditional linguistic analysis in two major ways: (a) It extends analysis beyond the level of sentence grammar, and (b) it considers the multidimensional, communicative constrains of the situation.

Anderson and Anderson (1997: 8) have cited that there are two main categories of texts- literary and factual. Literary texts include stories, movie scripts, limericks, fairy tales, plays, novels, song lyrics, mimes, and soap operas. They are designed to appeal to our emotions and imaginations; they can make us laugh or cry. They can also make us think about our own life or consider our beliefs.

The main text types that fall in this category are narrative, poetic, and dramatic. A narrative text is a piece of text which tells a story and, in doing so entertains or informs the reader or listener (ibid: 8). It is composed of its generic structure starting with orientation (scene setting and introduction), evaluation (stepping back to evaluate the plight), complication (crisis), resolution (crisis is resolved) and ended with re-orientation (Gerot and Wignell, 1994).

While Anderson and Anderson (1997: 8) have stated that a narrative comprises an orientation (a paragraph, picture or opening chapter in which the narrator tells the audience about who is in the story, when the story is taking place, and where the action happening), a complication ( a chain of events that influence what will happen in the story), a sequence of events where the characters react to the complication, a resolution in which the characters finally sort out the complication, and a coda (a comment or moral based on what has been learned from the story. The last is optional.

There are many different types or genres of narratives including humor, romance, crime, real-life fiction, historical fiction, mystery, fantasy, science fiction, diary-novels, and adventure. There can be a combination of narratives within each of these different types. For instance, a crime novel may include romance and mystery. Similarly, an adventure narrative may include humor and romance (ibid: 18).

                        Whereas the factual texts include advertisements, announcement, Internet web sites, current affair shows, debates, recipes, reports, and instructions. Their purpose is to present information or ideas and aims to show, tell, or persuade the audience. The main text types that fall in this category include recount, response, explanation discussion, information report, exposition and procedure.