Teaching English through jokes

Khodja Nasreddin

Teaching English using jokes for kids.
Do you use jokes in your classroom?

The basis for every nation's humour lies in its historical, socio-cultural and linguistic background. In order to get to know a nation's sense of humour one is forced to search much deeper. So what can a teacher do to improve the students' understanding of the English sense of humour? As a starting point a teacher can try to introduce jokes which are closely related to the Uzbek and English cultural and historical background, giving emphasis on the words her students are already familiar with.

Listening and acting out jokes will be enjoyable and make pupils smile, have fun. A joke is a suitable educational device. In this concrete situation it can be used in various ways.

Here a few suggestions:

to introduce a new topic or theme, tense, vocabulary or any other grammatical structure

to unburden the students of tension which appears during such lessons that involve a great amount of concentration

to prepare the students for more serious work involving various mental processes

to conclude a lesson in a pleasant way and at the same time remind them of the newly gained knowledge etc.

Jokes effectively deal with these requirements. Through jokes  a class will attend to, practice and integrate reading, writing, speaking and listening. They can act out the joke performing as drama. The use of role play and real life situations similarly encourage students to organise and activate the English language in a developmental way. It is important to consider vocabulary, word order, tense, correct grammar and pronunciation yet because the communication approximates reality, the language is brought to life. We can divide pupils into roles playing role game through jokes.

I suggest Khodja Nasriddin’s stories that I used in my classroom.

Khodja Nasreddin’s story 1.

The Khodja saw a group of ducks in the lake. He tried to catch one but couldn’t succeed, so he sat by the lake and took out a loaf of bread from his saddlebag. He broke the bread into pieces and started dunking them into the water and eating them. A passerby saw the Khodja and asked him what he was eating. The Khodja dunked another piece and said: “Duck soup”

Khodja Nasreddin’s story 2.

The villagers asked the Khodja, “Sir, in the morning some people go this way and some go the opposite way. Why? The Khodja answered: - “If all the people went in the same direction, the Earth would lose its balance and topple over”. Khodja Nasreddin’s stories are popular through Asian countries and they are acceptable and understandable for our pupils. Using English and American jokes also useful and acceptable, especially picture jokes are more interesting and funny for young learners. A teacher should be extremely careful about telling jokes. Not every teacher is a good joke-teller so it is of high importance to extensively prepare oneself for such an activity. Even the most amusing and entertaining joke loses its significance if it is told at an inconvenient time and place. A good teacher, however, always distinguishes between an appropriate and inappropriate moment.

We can organize “Joke competition” in the classroom. It’s very useful and effective way teaching English, to improve students’ listening, speaking and critical thinking skills.  There are many didactic activities that we can use in the classroom. For example, “6X6” activity.  Six people give six funny ideas in six minutes. We discussed using “6X6” activity through writing: I divided class into small groups of six and each pupil from each group wrote their jokes on the blackboard. They created new, funny joke.