Analysing Humorous Storybooks for the Use in the Primary EFL Classroom

Seminar paper from the year 2017 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, Bielefeld University (Fakultät für Linguistik und Literaturwissenschaft), course: Teaching English Language and Literature and Culture in the Primary EFL Classroom, language: English, abstract: Using humour is a good way to create a positive atmosphere in the primary English classroom and it helps the children to concentrate and to enjoy the lesson. Humour can for example be found in storybooks and is therefore seemingly easily accessible. Yet, it might be difficult for the children to understand in terms of their cognitive development or their cultural knowledge. This leads to some questions concerning the use of humorous children's books to teach language and culture of English-speaking countries to German primary school children. Firstly, it can be asked if picture books from different cultural backgrounds and with different kinds of humour can be used in primary school and what are possible difficulties in using books from a culture which is different from the listener's culture. Furthermore, it can be interesting to look at important factors to consider when using a humorous picture book, like cultural specific humour and children's humour. Finding approaches to answer these questions will be the focus of this paper. To do so, it shall be looked at theories of humour which will be applied to a German and an English picture book to analyse the humour used in these books.