Teachers search continually for innovative ways to make their classrooms more interesting, motivational and productive for their students. Students, particularly those taking English as a required course, may have few intrinsic motivators to their acquisition of the material presented. One immensely popular, and yet underutilized, intructional medium is cartoons and, more broadly, humorous illustrations. This article examines the use of cartoons and cartooning related exercises as instructional aids in the EFL laboratory. It posits initially that cartoons, for a variety of reasons, can be of extraordinary value in teaching a foreign language, and provides the theoretical grounding for this assertion. It then explores the various types of cartoons and their particular applicability in EFL instruction, and finally provides classroom and extracurricular exerises utilizing cartoons and cartooning activities as parctical means to enrich and enliven students' learning experience.
