DefinePK

Abstract

English is a global lingua franca and has become necessary for everyone to learn it. In Pakistan, there is aneed to find the ways and means to make this learning process easy and enjoyable. The present studyexplores the use of humour-based material to improve the speaking skill of Pakistani ESL learners.Although research on humour is growing across the globe (Farahani & Abdollahi, 2018) but in thecontext of Pakistan limited studies have been conducted in this regard. Humour, if included in teaching,helps the learners to learn with less conscious effort (Nayyar & Zeeshan, 2017). This study used IHPTand focused on understanding how humour-based teaching material affects the speaking skill of learners.A quasi-experimental design with two intact classes of Bachelor of Science comprising 30 students eachwas adopted in the study. By using an IELTS speaking test, a pretest was conducted and the post-testwas conducted after the 10 weeks of treatment. The results show that the students in the experimentalgroup improved their speaking in terms of fluency, lexical resources, and pronunciation while theimprovement in grammatical range of both the groups was not significantly different.