The use of humorous pre-reading materials on ESL learners' reading comprehension / Nursyafiqah Zabidin

Common instructional strategies of reading entail situations in which students are presented with reading texts without knowing the context beforehand. Such practice has been proven to deflate the learners' interest and motivation to read and subsequently leads to poor reading comprehension. A number of comprehension instructional models and studies advocated the use of pre-reading activities to instigate motivation and encourage comprehension in reading. Meanwhile, other studies have revealed that humour could stimulate interest and engagement in learning tasks and improve learning performance. Therefore, this study was done based on the belief that humorous pre-reading material could influence learners' reading comprehension. The study involved an experiment in order to answer the first research question which was to identify if there was any significant difference in comprehension test scores between the group exposed to humorous pre-reading materials and the group not exposed to the materials. The study also employed an interview in order to answer the second research question which was to determine how humorous pre-reading materials influence the students' reading comprehension, t test analysis revealed that there was no significant difference between the two groups' scores. However, gradual improvement was detected from the experimental group's comprehension test scores. Meanwhile, interview analysis described the insights on some influences that humour has on the participants' reading comprehension. Implications of this study included propositions for language instructors to apply pre-reading activity as well as diversify their teaching materials by including humorous stimuli in their reading classrooms.