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

Abstract

Humor and empathy are two important elements in successful communication, especially for medical professionals. To test the hypothesis that implementing humor in EFL studentspsila English learning would enhance studentspsila 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. Participantspsila 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 studentspsila empathy and English proficiency.