Humor and Empathy: Developing Students' Empathy through Teaching Robots to Tell English Jokes

摘要

Humor and empathy are two important elements in successful communication, especially for medical professionals. To test the hypothesis that implementing humor in EFL students’ English learning would enhance students’ empathy and English proficiency simultaneously, this study was conducted at a medical university in Taiwan from February to June 2008. Humor was implemented in learning activities. Participants’ sense of humor, empathy, and public speaking skills were assessed. All the speaking assessments were recorded and evaluated. The assessment results (n = 28; 15 males and 13 females) show that 92.9% of the participants made progress in English self-introductions, 100% in role-plays, and  71.4% developed a greater sense of humor, 57.1% perceived themselves as having a greater sense of humor, 46.4% had greater desire to become more humorous, and 60.7% had developed greater empathy. These results proved that the use of humor was able to enhance students’ empathy and English proficiency.