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1.2.2 Classroom Mood and English Learning
As far as we know, teaching and learning never take place in isolation. In this process, many factors are involved, such as teachers, students, materials, environmental factors and so on. Actually, these processes are the interactions between teachers and students, students and students, teachers and materials, students and materials, environmental factors and students, environmental factors and teachers. Therefore, it is impossible to for us to avoid talking about mood when we talk about the teaching methods and skills in foreign language research. We seldom have taken effect of mood into consideration in FL learning and teaching for several decades. Currently, people have come to this aspect, but we still got an ambiguous picture of classroom mood. Chen and Zhang (1998) defined classroom mood as a state of feeling or emotion both teachers and students experienced during the process of instruction (teaching and learning), which often monitored instructional activities automatically and had an effect on their happening and development. In fact, it is a certain kind of classroom climate, which will be guaranteed to produce the efficiency of teaching and learning in the classroom. From the perspective of the students, classroom mood mainly refer to the interest, attitudes, values and preferences that students express about a particular subject or course, and that students have about their teacher’s and peer’s personality and teaching and learning competence respectively, and that are associated with teaching and learning environment. The traits of these emotions indicate that such classroom mood is relatively stable, especially for senior students, as their teachers, materials, peers, classrooms and even learning goals are relatively stable. When students are free from disruptive anxieties, fears, anger, boredom and depression, they are more likely to make desirable cognitive and effective gains. Well, what often decides such classroom climate? More than any other person, the way the teachers give a lesson sets the classroom climate.
1.3 Function of Humor Creating Positive Classroom Mood
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1.3.1 Increasing Motivation
Motivation may be construed as a state of cognitive and emotional arousal, which leads to a conscious decision to act, and gives rise to a period of sustained intellectual or physical effort in order to attain a previously set goal.
The initial motivation may be triggered by different factors, perhaps the internal ones such as interest or curiosity, and often by external influence such as another person or event. It is clear that motivation occurs as a result of a combination of different influences. Some of these influences are internal, which comes from the inside of the learner, such as an interest in the activity or a wish to succeed. Others are external, for example, the influence of other people. This internal-external distinction is the one that has played a significant part in many current theories of motivation.
According to Li Rumi (1998:374), the use of humor in teaching can help to increase the motivation of the students. As a decision-making teacher, if you add humor to your classes, you can gain the attention of the whole class and keep their interests in the material presented. For the students are more interested in a humorous explanation.
1.3.2 Reducing Anxiety
Anxiety, one of the most prominent and pervasive emotions, was defined as a feeling of uneasy suspense. It was a research focus in many disciplines such as psychology and education. “Anxiety is the subjective feeling of tension, apprehension, nervousness, and worry associated with an arousal of the autonomic nervous system” (Spielberger 1983:577). Not only was it intuitive to many people that anxiety had been found to interfere with language learning, it was logical because anxiety had been found to interfere with many types of learning and had been one of the most highly examined variables in psychology and education. （科教作文网http://zw.NSEaC.com编辑发布）
The application of humor in English class can help to reduce anxiety and help to promote understanding and facilitate memory, which all together help the study of language (陈艳松2004). Positive humor helps to create a positive classroom mood which encourages the learners’ desire to take part in classroom conversation by decreasing anxiety and stress.
A positive classroom mood coupled with increased motivation encourages the young learners to take risk and participate in the use of English, because there is no fear of criticism or being ridiculed in joyful and non-threatening environment.