Insights from Students’ Perspective of 9GAG Humorous Memes Used in EFL Classroom

Abstract

Funny memes, circulating on the internet, are easily accessible media to produce laughter in any setting, including teaching-learning setting. The laughter resulted can be crucial to tackle barriers of communication for educational purposes. This paper is aimed at revealing EFL learners' perception of funny memes taken from 9GAG Apps used during teaching-learning session in EFL context. It is also set to seek the influence of humor in building learners' engagement in classroom activities. This qualitative research employs questionnaire and observation as the instruments to collect the data from 30 adults EFL learners. These EFL learners have multi-background (gender, intelligence level, and social) which is beneficial to the objectivity of the perception. The results revealed that the majority of EFL learners believed that humor could cheer them during teaching-learning session of English and make them less stressful. Humor also assists to build a better chemistry between teacher and EFL learners; making them remember and understand the lesson better. The last, it also encourages EFL learners to be more actively involved in the classroom activities. Nevertheless, some constraints arise during the application of humor taken from 9GAG. English teacher needs to understand the characteristics of learners and their interests prior to implementing this pedagogical technique. Due to the nature of humor that is segmented, the right humorous material would be more likely acceptable, and it would cause emotional and psychological impact that can develop EFL learners' learning ability.