A perplexing silence: unlocking student communication through teacher humor in the EFL classroom

A persistent paradox haunts English as a foreign language classrooms: students report high learning enjoyment yet exhibit a perplexing silence and low willingness to communicate. Grounded in Control-Value Theory, this study conceptualizes teacher humor as an external antecedent that shapes learners' control-value appraisals, thereby enhancing enjoyment and indirectly fostering willingness to communicate (WTC). This study proposes and empirically tests a psychological mechanism that contributes to understanding this "affect-behavior" gap, positioning teacher humor as a significant pedagogical factor. Path analysis of 483 undergraduates confirmed a significant indirect effect: teacher humor (TH) significantly boosted English learning enjoyment (ELE), which in turn was a powerful predictor of willingness to communicate. The partial mediation model reveals that the association between teacher humor and communicative intent proceeds primarily through this affective pathway, with ELE functioning as a crucial mechanism that mediates the relationship between them. This research offers two critical contributions: 1) It provides a tangible, teacher-driven strategy to mitigate the prevalent issue of student reticence. 2) It illuminates the specific psychological pathway for affect-to-behavior conversion in a second language context, offering a valuable theoretical model for future research on classroom emotional dynamics.