Abstract:

This paper explores the role of humor in foreign language teaching, highlighting its potential to enhance learning outcomes and student engagement and to alleviate learner anxiety, as students and instructors alike advocate. By creating a positive and enjoyable classroom atmosphere, humor, as an immediacy behavior (Mehrabian), can facilitate rapport between teachers and students, encouraging active participation and fostering a sense of camaraderie. Through exposure to amusing materials, students might develop critical thinking skills and linguistic creativity, as they interpret wordplay, idiomatic expressions, and cultural references, gaining insights into the soul of the target language. However, the employment of humor should not be taken lightly, researchers also caution, as it is highly influenced by context and subjective factors and, unless used graciously and rigorously, it might lead to setbacks and misunderstandings instead.

This research investigates the effectiveness of humor within the context of Romanian language learning by foreigners, elucidating its diverse functions and strategies for cultivating comedic environments, with a particular emphasis on facilitating vocabulary enhancement and communicative skills acquisition. The study examines the interaction between humor and second language (L2) proficiency, enjoyment of the foreign language learning process, and receptiveness to a spectrum of techniques aimed at generating amusement.

Keywords:

Foreign language learning, humor, linguistics, pragmatics.