Available online at www.jlls.org JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTIC STUDIES ISSN: 1305-578X Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies, 13(1), 123-145; 2017 Developing pre-service English language teachers‟ comprehension of texts with humorous elements Ceylan Yangın Ersanlıa*, Abdulvahit Çakırb aOndokuz Mayıs University, Samsun, Turkey bGazi University, Ankara, Turkey Yangın Ersanlı, C., & Çakır, A. (2017).Developing Pre-service English Language Teachers‟ Comprehension of Texts with Humorous Elements.Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies, 13(1), 123-145. Submission Date:15/09/2016 Acceptance Date:24/02/2017 Abstract Humour is a universal phenomenon and has been studied in many fields of research such as literature, linguistics, psychology¸ sociology and philosophy. Humour is often expressed through languageand it is little wonder that failure to understand humorous language causes breakdowns in communication. What is humorous might be culturally defined, and therefore it is difficult to grasp or to teach. Yet, people convey too much through humour to be neglected in the language classroom. Even if we need not aim at helping our learners find a piece of foreign language funny and laugh at it, we should help them appreciate humour and see beyond the literal meaning. In other words, pre-service English language teachers should be able to get the message conveyed through humorous texts using related sub-skills of reading effectively. This study investigates pre-service English language teachers‟ perceptions of humour in English language learning materials and authentic texts and how to improve their comprehension of reading texts with humorous elements with special reference to certain sub- skills of reading comprehension. © 2017 JLLS and the Authors - Published by JLLS. Keywords:humour, foreign language teaching, reading skill, sub-skills of reading, pre-service English language teachers 1. Introduction Humour occupies a great role in social interaction, literature and culture. Humour is so much a part of our lives that we may sometimes take its role in human communication for granted. Humour manipulates language to achieve its effect and therefore can be regarded as a mode of communication. People often make their points clear by humour, namely by practical jokes, satire, irony, wit, sarcasm, puns, verbal humour and so on. Humour is a part of social interaction and we cannot say communication is achieved when the interlocutors fail to understand the language of humour. Following this reasoning, language of humour is significant in language teaching. Humour is culture-specific. In other words, what is considered to be funny might change from culture to culture. However, not all humour is strictly culture-bound. Communication breakdowns *Corresponding author. Tel.: +90-505-319-2377 E-mail address: [email protected] 124 Ceylan Yangın Ersanlı, Abdulvahit Çakır/ Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies, 13(1) (2017) 123-145 occur only when learners of a target language cannot comprehend the deeper surface meanings within a written text or when they cannot get the message conveyed, not when they do not find it funny. Language learners‟failure to understand humorous language may result in their misunderstanding and a communication breakdown is inevitable since the intended message cannot be received adequately. However, the role of humour in language teaching and learning has been overlooked. Most of our students are not aware of what makes a spoken or written text humorous. The majority of language learners, even the ones that we define as upper-intermediate or advanced, often fail to understand the humorous language and they tend to get the message on literal terms. Without knowing the nature of humorous language, they cannot be fully competent in the target language, that is to say, they may not get the intended message without serious communication breakdowns. Therefore, studying on texts with humorous elements with special emphasis on certain sub-skills of reading might help learners develop their humour competence and thus appreciate texts fully. Vega (1989), in her MA thesis “Humour Competence: The Fifth Component”, claims that humour competence is a part of communicative competence and since our ultimate aim is to make learners more communicatively competent it should be taught in our schools. The main focus in this study is to enable language learners in the ELT departments to appreciate humorous texts in the target language. Though they are much more proficient than regular foreign language learners, pre-service English language teachers may tend to perceive the target language on its literary meaning and fail to get the intended meaning by making the necessary inferences. Therefore, unless they are well aware of the dynamics of humour in social interaction, their communicative competence will certainly be incomplete. This study aims to highlight the importance of humour in communication and also aims at using samples of humorous texts in authentic reading materials to find out whether pre-service English language teachers are able to appreciate the humour or not. In other words it aims at finding out whether they are able to get what is conveyed through humour. This study also intends to help pre- service English language teachers improve their reading comprehension and inferencing skills through comprehension of humorous language in the target language. Finally, the study aims to increase the motivation of pre-service English language teachers in the reading lessons by using humorous texts. 1.1. Literature review 1.1.1. Towards a Definition of Reading Comprehension The challenge of teaching reading comprehension is increased because students are expected to read a bigger variety of text types, which may often include authentic humorous texts. Effective reading in a second or foreign language requires more than word identification or syntactic knowledge, it requires synthesis and evaluation skills, inferencing, making use of background knowledge, being aware of the communicative value of the text, understanding the implied meanings and what is communicated more within the text, extracting the writer‟s intention appropriately, and so on. As Goodman and Smith claimed reading can be better modeled as a „psycholinguistic guessing game‟, in which the text provides clues for the reader, and in which not only the meaning of the text but also the intentions of the writer have to be guessed (in Goatly, 2000:121). Reading is an interactive process between the reader and the text. Studies reveal that using strategies enhance reading comprehension (Sarıçoban, 2002). Reading is composed of many skills, and a recent taxonomy of sub-skills of reading is below: - Comprehending text by using knowledge of the world and by using different skills such as skimming and scanning .Ceylan Yangın Ersanlı, Abdulvahit Çakır / Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies, 13(1) (2017) 123-145 125 - Recognizing the main idea of the passage or the text - Inferring meaning by making use of textual clues - Recognizing and understanding relations between parts of a text through references - Making predictions and intelligent guesses - Understanding the communicative value of the text and sentences - Distinguishing between main and subordinate clauses by identifying Subject/Verb/Object (SVO) relations - Inferring meaning of unknown words through textual clues (Khand, 2004). Of the above given effective reading skills, those that are particularly related to comprehending humour are discussed below: Making Appropriate Inferences: Drawing appropriate inferences is especially important in understanding the implied or intended meanings within reading materials. Stebick and Dain define inference as “the process of judging, concluding, or reasoning from some given information” (2007: 72). Drawing appropriate inferences in reading can be called as „reading between the lines‟. At this point pragmatic awareness plays a vital role. For effective reading students should be able to make inferences, differentiate between literal and figurative language and see the implications not overtly stated. Inferencing involves a set of different skills and processes such as syntactic, semantic, and discoursal awareness as well as activating background knowledge. Failure in any component may hinder the inferencing process or result in inappropriate or fault inferences. Understanding the Purpose, Intention, Attitude or Tone: It is certain that being aware of the function of a reading material has a striking role in comprehension. Thus, one of the very first things students should be taught is to find out whether the text aims at convincing the reader, giving him information, asking him for something, making him laugh, etc. Language learners should practice with activities that focus on the attitude of the writer or the attitude of the characters within a passage, the particular kind of bias or purpose that can be felt through the writing. This is of particular interest in humorous passages. Tone is often one of the most difficult aspects of a text to grasp. The tone of a text refers to the emotional attitude expressed by it. Fitzpatrick and Ruscica (1995: 263) and Johnson (2001: 309) mean the same thing when they define tone as “a writer‟s attitude toward the subject or the material he or she discusses”. A student may understand all the facts within a text and yet may fail to recognize the humour or irony in it. A text's tone can be happy, sad, angry, and so on. Tone is an important element in literary and informational texts. It tells you what the author thinks and helps to create atmosphere. Being able to identify the writer‟s tone contributes to the understanding of the text on a deeper level. Understanding the Main Idea of a Text or Paragraph: One of the most important points to keep in mind when teaching reading comprehension is the recognition of main ideas. For effective reading readers are expected to demonstrate that they can identify the subject of a reading text. Finding the main idea of a text is closely related to its purpose. Johnson states that “Usually it is helpful to determine the main idea and how it is stated before you determine the author‟s purpose” (2001: 281). For effective reading readers have to comprehend the gist of any reading material. Otherwise, it is possible that they can miss some very important message within the text. Critical Reading, Making Synthesizing and Intelligent Guesses: Spache and Berg (1984: 143) remark that reading critically is “the ability to read with analysis and judgment”. Synthesizing is an important part of reading critically. The term is defined by Boyles (2004) as “a matter of seeing how the details fit together to draw a conclusion, how the details solve a mystery, or how they bring 126 Ceylan Yangın Ersanlı, Abdulvahit Çakır/ Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies, 13(1) (2017) 123-145 characters (and readers) to a new understanding”. It is an ongoing process and is necessary for effective comprehension. A good synthesis leads to accurate understanding of a given text. Guessing the Meaning of Words from Context: Efficient readers are able to use context clues to determine the meaning of unknown words. In this way “you identify the correct meaning belonging to a specific word by recognizing and interpreting other words in the surrounding context” (Johnson, 2001:65). If a reader can accurately find the word which describes a character or a particular situation depicted in a given text, this means he comprehended the text successfully. 1.1.2. Linguistic Approaches to Humour 1.1.2.1. Lexical and Syntactic Ambiguity as a Source of Humour Lexical and syntactic ambiguities may contribute to semantic confusion. As opposed to the numerous studies related to linguistic ambiguity (Hirst, 1987; Franz, 1996; Ravin & Leacock, 2000; Gorfein, 2001), very few studies focus on ambiguity as a source of humour. Attardo (1994) analyzed the strategies used to create ambiguity-based humor. Bucaria (2004) analyzed lexical and syntactic ambiguity as a source of humor in newspaper headlines. Oaks (1994:378) also studied structural ambiguity in jokes. Oaks defines lexical ambiguity as conveyed by “a word with more than one possible meaning in a context”. Syntactic ambiguity is created by confusion between different parts of speech. Consider the following example: Man in Restaurant: I‟ll have two lamb chops, and make them lean, please. Waiter: To which side, sir? (Bucaria, 2004: 291). The word “lean” is an adjective meaning “meat not having much fat on it”. Yet, the waiter took it as a verb meaning moving or bending something in a particular direction. The humour is based on a confusion of different possible meanings of the word. 1.1.2.2. Semantic Script Theory of Humour The Semantic Script Theory of Humour was proposed by Victor Raskin (1985). It is the most well- developed linguistic theory of humour. According to Martin (2007: 89) the theory incorporates ideas about scripts and is also influenced by Noam Chomsky‟s concepts of transformational generative grammars for relating the deep structure, or underlying meaning of a text to its surface structure (the actual words that are used). His theory provides a formal model of humour competence; i.e. how a text can be recognized as humorous. Raskin‟s theory conceives of scripts as graphs with lexical nodes and semantic links between nodes. In theory, all the scripts make up a single multi-dimensional semantic network. Words in a sentence are thought to evoke a script or scripts with which they are associated. Many researches have been conducted to analyze the role of scripts in humorous communication (Attardo & Raskin, 1991; Attardo, Hempelmann & Di Maio, 2002; Brock, 2004; Morreall, 2004; and Hempelmann, 2004). Ruch, Attardo and Raskin (1993:124) summarized the main hypotheses of the theory as follows: - A text can be characterized as a single-joke-carrying-text if both of the following conditions are satisfied: - Each joke must contain two overlapping scripts (that is, the joke must be interpretable, fully or in part, according to two different scripts); .Ceylan Yangın Ersanlı, Abdulvahit Çakır / Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies, 13(1) (2017) 123-145 127 - The two scripts must be opposed (that is, they must be the negation of each other, if only for the purpose of a given text), according to a list of basic oppositions, such as real/unreal, possible/impossible, etc. See the following joke to illustrate this point (Attardo, 1991:249): A young lady was talking to the doctor who had operated upon her. “Do you think the scar will show?” she asked. “That will be entirely up to you”, he said. As is seen, the passage goes from the Medical script to the Nudity script. 1.1.2.3. Pragmatic Theories of Humour Pragmatics can contribute to explaining how people construct humour and process meaning. Kotthoff states that in humorous activities “non-standardized inferencing forms the core of the humorous potential. It arises either from a sort of script opposition or from playing with formulation standards and expected ways of speaking within conversational sequencing” (2005:271). In this respect, the Gricean cooperation principle and its maxims for the analysis of humour should be addressed. Humour researchers, following Grice‟s suggestion, state that “irony and humor might be connected to violations of the conversational maxims” (Attardo, 1993:538). Grice (1975) explains conversational implicature as a means of expressing a message indirectly. Participants in a conversation, Grice says, expect each other to make their contributions to that conversation truthful, relevant, clear, and sufficiently informative, which are the attributes referred to by her maxims ofquality, quantity, relation and manner respectively. If the literal meaning of something that is said or written fails to meet these expectations, the listeners or readers search for another possible meaning for that utterance in that particular context and if they find one, they assume the latter meaning to be the message the speaker, or writer intends to convey. Grice names these inferential paths as implicatures. He also distinguishes conventional from conversational implicatures: conventional implicatures are lexicalized; conversational implicatures are calculated each time the speaker and the hearer interact (Attardo, 1993). One basic assumption within humour research is that a large number of humorous texts involve violations of one or more of Grice‟s maxims. Consider the following example that violates the maxim of quantity by not providing enough information (Attardo, 1993: 541): “Excuse me, do you know what time it is?” “Yes.” As is well known, speakers and writers make choices not only in what they say, but also in how they say it. Kotthoff explains that “most humorous activities invite non-standardized inferences as the core of humour. Their inner dynamic comes from playing with scripts, inviting unusual associations, disappointing expectations, and creating sense in nonsense…” (2005:273). Humorous communication is one of the means of achieving this. See the following examples: (1) In an examination the teacher creates humour by saying that “I deliberately asked all of you the same questions so that you won‟t need to wonder what‟s written in others‟ papers!” (2) A rich but a very stingy man was on the point of dying. Throughout all his life, he had made the people around him live in discomfort. There was a religious man near him. The stingy man asked him (groaning): “Ah.. I wonder, can I take all the gold to where I am going?”. The man shook his head and said: “That would be an effort in vain. Your gold will melt there.” 128 Ceylan Yangın Ersanlı, Abdulvahit Çakır/ Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies, 13(1) (2017) 123-145 In example (1) the teacher violates more than one maxim of conversation. He violates maxim of relation and maxim of manner. The teacher creates obscurity of expression, but at the same time he warns students not to cheat. The students are expected to infer the implicit message within the text. Although he used a humorous way to assert his opinion, he warns his students. In example (2) the text of humour is not its literal meaning. The religious man instead of saying that nobody would need any gold after his death, willingly violates the maxim of quantity. The implicated meaning of the text is that the dying man is going to hell. 1.1.3. The Communicative Value of Humorous Texts As is stated above, most humorous texts violate one or more of the maxims. Therefore, one may expect them to be uncooperative and lose their meaning. Nevertheless, fully competent language users understand and perceive them as well-formed texts. To account for this, Raskin (1985) suggests that humorous texts have different kind of communication mode, governed by a different set of maxims. In literal reading there may seem some violation of maxims. However, in a true processing of a humorous text, the reader will discover a second sense. The script theory proposed by Raskin (1985) describes this phenomenon as the „discovery of a second script‟. Sometimes the violation of maxims gives way to the unexpected presence of a second script. The text producer uses the violation of maxims to mislead the text processor into believing that reliable information is provided until an element is encountered that defeats that sense and forces a reinterpretation of the text. This dynamic process is schematized below: Interpretation emergence re- backtracking text is of a script of the interpretation humorous punch-line of the text Figure 1.Reinterpretation of a Text As is depicted above, the reader has two options. He may either discard the text as ill-formed, or nonsense, and therefore will think that the text does not convey any meaning and information, or he may backtrack and reevaluate and check for possible inferences. Only this way can he fully comprehend the writer‟s intended message within the text. Readers frequently have difficulties in reading comprehension. This is often attributed to poor ability to draw inferences during reading and to inadequate access to relevant knowledge. Implied meaning is a meaning that isn't explicitly stated. In humorous texts it is a well-known fact that some part of the information must be left implicit. Explanation reduces the humorous effect within texts. Texts lose their humour when the narrator explains the punch line. “It is precisely because part of the information is present only in the implicit part of the text that the joke acquires one of its characteristics” (Attardo, 1991:248). In other words, for the text to be humorous, some information must be left unsaid. This means that the reader is required to perform some cognitive task and to infer the implicit information. Another fact is that the punch-lines of humorous texts frequently come unexpectedly towards the end of the texts. The decoding of humorous texts is a structured process in which the elements of texts are organized in a linear order. For example, the presence of a second sense (for example the emergence of a second script) should not be introduced early in the text in case the reader may actualize the second sense via inferential channels. .Ceylan Yangın Ersanlı, Abdulvahit Çakır / Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies, 13(1) (2017) 123-145 129 1.2. Research questions The following research questions have guided this study: 1- Are pre-service English language teachers able to comprehend reading texts with humourous elements adequately? 2- Can pre-service English language teachers improve their comprehension of reading texts with humourous elements through studying effective sub-skills of reading? 3- What are pre-service English language teachers‟ perceptions about studying reading texts with humourous elements? 2. Method 2.1. Design This study is an 8-week experimental study based on classroom research carried out in an EFL reading class. Both quantitative and qualitative data gathering methods are used in the study. The names of the statistical analyses used in the study are Mann-Whitney U tests, Covariance Analyses and K-R (20). The independent variable in the study is the eight-week instructional program and the dependent variable of the study is improving pre-service English language teachers‟ comprehension of texts with humorous elements, their reading comprehension and communicative competence. 2.2. Sample / Participants This study is conducted at Gazi University, Department of English Language Teaching Program (ELT). The subjects are 53 pre-service English language teachers. They are all first graders. They are adult students with an age range of 18 to 20. These students have three hours of reading classes each week. Their levels range from upper-intermediate to advanced level. The native language of these students is Turkish. They are chosen randomly for the study. 2.3. Instructional Materials As discussed before, the use of authentic texts is highly recommended in language classrooms. Therefore, in the instructional process, the reading texts with humorous elements are chosen from sources other than those developed with the aim of language teaching and learning. While selecting the texts, the researcher is careful to take the criteria proposed by McGrath (2006: 106) into consideration. The texts‟ relevance to humour, to what extent they can motivate students intrinsically, if the cultural elements within the texts hinder students‟ comprehension or not, the texts‟ linguistic appropriateness, length, and so forth are all taken into account while designing the procedure. An 8- week program is developed for the experimental group by the researcher. In each week, one hour of their regular reading courses is spared for the study of humorous texts (a total of 8 hours at the end of the study) while the control group is attending to their regular reading courses. The experimental group has continued their regular course book study in the remaining two hours. Each week, at least two texts with humorous elements are introduced to the students in the experimental group. In the chapters of the course-book studied by both of the groups some sub-skills of reading have been focused on; namely, scanning, skimming, working out the meanings of words from their contexts, 130 Ceylan Yangın Ersanlı, Abdulvahit Çakır/ Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies, 13(1) (2017) 123-145 inferring meaning when it is not stated directly, relating the contents of an article to its title, and identifying the purpose. 2.4. Data Collection Tools and the Procedure The Multi-dimensional Sense of Humor Scale (hereafter MSHS) developed by J. A. Thorson and F. C. Powell (1993) is administered to the subjects in order to obtain a general humour sense profile of the students. Later, a 43-item reading test with humorous texts is developed. Then, this test is revised by five experts to ensure its face validity. Their suggestions are taken into account and necessary changes are made. Later, it is administered to a total of 100 students other than the experimental and control groups. The results are statistically evaluated in terms of their reliability and validity. Eleven questions are eliminated. The remaining 32 items constitutes the final reading test. This 32-item reading test with humorous elements has 0.81 reliability and it is used as pre and post-tests for the experimental and control groups (See Appendix). Table 1: The Sub-skills assessed in the Reading Test Subskills Items Inferencing: understanding less or not explicitly stated information 1, 5, 10, 14, 16, 17, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31,32 Understanding the purpose, intention, attitude or the tone 2, 4, 7, 9, 11, 12, 18, 20, 25, 29 Understanding the main idea, gist of the text 8, 13, 22, 23, 24 Critical Reading: synthesizing and making intelligent guesses 15, 19, 21 Guessing Meaning from Context: recognizing synonyms, 3, 6 antonyms, guessing meaning from context, finding a word/phrase that best describes a person or situation Next, the pre-test is administered to both of the groups to find out to what extent students have appreciated the humour in the reading materials and whether they have got the intended message or not. An analysis of the findings of the pre-test sheds light on what is missing and what should be emphasized. The results indicate that both the experimental and the control groups have problems in getting the message conveyed through humour, and their performances are below average. During the instructional procedure, a rich variety of humorous text examples from the internet and authentic reading resources are analysed to design humorous texts to be used in the reading classroom. Throughout eight weeks, reading texts with humorous elements are studied with the experimental group with special emphasis on related sub-skills of reading in order to improve their reading comprehension, humour awareness and communicative competence. The students are expected to become more competent in looking at a text from a number of aspects. It is hoped that the students in the experimental group will be able to go beyond surface meaning and to discover the deeper meaning of a given text, and to make appropriate inferences. Finally, the post-test is administered to both of the groups to see if the students in the experimental group have improved in getting the message conveyed through humour. The results of both of the groups gathered from pre and post tests are statistically evaluated to see the effectiveness of the instruction. Finally, a student evaluation form is developed and given to the experimental group to obtain a clear view of their perceptions of the process and to see whether they are more intrinsically motivated. .Ceylan Yangın Ersanlı, Abdulvahit Çakır / Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies, 13(1) (2017) 123-145 131 2.5. Limitations of the Study Humour is a vast area of research and can be used in many forms such as cartoons, TV sitcoms, comedy shows, humorous books and so on. However, this study is only limited to humorous texts since they are the most frequently found materials in foreign language learners‟ course books and skill books. 3. Results and Discussion 3.1. The multi dimensional Sense of Humour Scale (MSHS) The MSHS is administered to 53 pre-service English language teachers at Gazi University. The control group consists of 25 students, while 28 students constitute the experimental group. A statistical analysis program, Mann-Whitney U test, is used to see if the students in both of the groups have statistically equal sense of humour. The following table demonstrates the statistical results obtained from the scale. Table 2: The Statistical Results Obtained from the Multi Dimensional Sense of Humor Scale (MSHS) Administered at the Beginning of the Study n X S Mean Z Level of Rank Significance Experimental 28 14,14 4,24 26,21 -3.393 Insignificant* Group Control Group 25 14,76 3,98 27,88 *p>.05 The two groups, namely the experimental and the control groups are compared statistically to see if they are equal in term of their sense of humour by a statistical analysis program named Mann-Whitney U test. Table 2 reveals the statistical results obtained from MSHS. The results reveal that the difference between their senses of humour is statistically insignificant. 3.2. The Reading Comprehension Test The quantitative data in the study is collected through the reading comprehension test which consisting of texts with humorous elements. In order to give correct answers to questions the students are expected to use the above given sub-skills of reading comprehension effectively. Moreover, the researcher is careful that the humour within the texts is not merely built upon on target language culture, and that the students are given a glossary related to the texts within the test. This is especially important in that the test does not aim at assessing students‟ knowledge of cultural aspects of the target language but rather aims at finding whether the students are able to make the necessary inferences, think critically, and whether they are able to understand the tone and purpose of the text, or the intention of the characters within the texts or the intention or attitude of the writer. The test is used as a pre-test to determine whether the two groups are statistically equal in terms of reading comprehension with humorous texts and if they need any training to comprehend texts with humorous elements more effectively. Later the same test is used as post-test at the end of the instructional procedure to assess the effectiveness of the training process. The statistical findings of 132 Ceylan Yangın Ersanlı, Abdulvahit Çakır/ Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies, 13(1) (2017) 123-145 the pre and the post-test applied to the groups will be evaluated by Covariance Analyses and will be discussed in a more detailed way below. Table 3:The Statistical Results Obtained from the Pre-Reading Test to Compare the Overall Success of the Experimental and the Control Groups and Mann-Whitney U Test Scores n X S Mean Z Level of Rank Significance Experimental 28 72,10 9,71 30,84 -1.91 Insignificant* Group Control Group 25 67,16 8,53 22,70 *p>.05 As Table 3 reveals that both the control and the experimental groups demonstrate statistically similar performances on the test, and no statistically significant difference among the students‟ scores can be found. Therefore, it can be claimed that both of the groups are equal in terms of pre-test results. It appears that their levels of reading comprehension and their effective and appropriate use of the sub skills of reading are at the same level in terms of the pre-test results. The following tableshows the statistical results obtained from the pre and post reading tests comparing the overall success of the groups. Table 4: The Statistical Results obtained through Covariance Analysis on Pre and Post-Reading Test comparing the Overall Success of the Experimental and the Control Groups Corrected Sum of Sum of Sum of Sum of sd Squares x Product Squares y Squares y sd Mean Square F Between Groups 1 5,03 -30,23 181,65 215,04 1 215,04 18,31* Within Group 51 867,99 475,61 847,90 587,29 50 11,75 Group n 52 873,02 445,38 1029,55 802,33 51 *P<.001 In Table 4, the statistical analysis of the pre- and post-test scores of the experimental and the control groups are given. As is seen, there is a statistically significant difference in favour of the experimental group. In other words, the experimental group is more successful than the control group. Therefore,it may be concluded that pre-service English language teachers may comprehend texts with humorous elements better if they study on such texts than those who are only instructed by texts with no humorous elements. The following table shows the performances of both groups with regard to the sub-skills assessed in the pre and post-test. The sub-skills are (a)understanding less or not explicitly stated information, (b) understanding the function, purpose or tone, understanding the author‟s, characters or the text‟s intention, attitude or purpose, (c) understanding the main idea or gist of the text or paragraph, (d) synthesizing and making intelligent guesses, (e) guessing meaning from context, and finding a word or phrase that best describes a person or situation.