Abstract: Humor is a kind of special but widespread language phenomenon, which permeate in all aspects of daily life. Questionnaire and interviews are used as investigative tools in this paper, and 60 students from Zhejiang University of Finance and Economics who majoring in English are selected as participants to conduct the research(30 seniors and 30 freshmen). The research aim to investigate whether the degree of English humor comprehension of Chinese English majors has changed with the improvement of English proficiency. This paper found that Chinese students generally have a low level of understanding of English humor, they always have a better understanding of IR jokes than I jokes and have a better understanding of culturally-neutral jokes than culturally-loaded jokes. Seniors are generally better than freshmen in humor understanding. Based on the findings, this paper puts forward some suggestions on English teaching.

Key words: English understanding; English majors; the classification of humor; English level

Contents

Abstract

摘要

1.Introduction-1

2. Humor-3

2.1Definition of humor-3

2.2 The classification of humor theories-5

3. Research design-8

3.1 Research questions-8

3.2 Participants-8

3.3 Tools-8

3.4 Data collection-9

4.Results-9

4.1 Comparison between different jokes-9

4.2 Analysis of humor degree judgment between seniors and freshmen-12

5.Discussion-19

6.Conclusion-20

References-21

Appendix-23