Foreign Language Enjoyment

Foreign language enjoyment and speaking anxiety in the classroom are two potential emotion-inducing factors for foreign language learning. This sequential mixed methods study investigated whether and to what extent Iranian EFL students experienced foreign language enjoyment and public speaking anxiety in their English classrooms, and how they characterize the sources of the enjoyment and speaking anxiety in such a context. To these ends, 128 learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) from several English language institutes, selected based on convenience sampling, took part in this research. They completed Dewaele and MacIntyre’s (2014b) Foreign Language Enjoyment and Yaikhong and Usaha’s (2012) Public Speaking Class Anxiety questionnaires, and write down about an episode in which they had experienced enjoyment and speaking anxiety in the EFL classroom. Quantitative and qualitative statistical data analyses were applied to examine foreign language enjoyment and public speaking class anxiety. Descriptive data analysis showed that the learners had a medium-to-high foreign language degree of enjoyment and a low level of public speaking anxiety. Besides, they reported more enjoyment than public speaking anxiety in class. Further qualitative data analysis revealed 12 sub-themes and four main themes of Teacher, Learning, Class Activities, and Class Atmosphere in explaining their enjoyment, as well as eight sub-themes and four main themes of Exam Phobia, Reaction/Feedback, Personal Failure, and Lack of Self-Confidence for speaking anxiety. The findings provide implications for language teachers and policymakers to gain better insights into factors underlying enjoyment and speaking anxiety in the field of foreign language learning.

This study seeks to determine whether or not using indigenous Taiwanese folktales as materials in EFL classes could help to improve the learning outcomes of indigenous Taiwanese high school students by increasing their foreign language enjoyment and motivation. Indigenous high school students in this study used two types of classroom materials: A graded reader set in a generic western milieu and then a series of indigenous folktales that had been translated into English. After each intervention, the students were asked to fill out a questionnaire that evaluated their enjoyment, interest, motivation, and self-perceived efficacy. Interviews and focus groups followed. The study found that students enjoyed the indigenous stories more by a statistically significant margin. The indigenous stories were also more effective in motivating students, while students perceived both types of material to be equally effective in terms of helping them learn new words and improve their proficiency. Implications for practitioners and policy makers are discussed.

Positive emotions are regarded as vital constructs in L2 learning. With the advent of positive psychology in SLA, the link between L2 grit and Foreign Language Enjoyment (FLE), as an achievement emotion, has drawn the attention of numerous scholars. However, despite these investigations, what remains is to see to what extent this link can be accounted for by the control and value appraisals of classroom activities and tasks. In other words, what is the matter of debate is how L2 learners’ perseverance and consistency of interest during the performance of language tasks and activities can predict their enjoyment when they are in control of, or out of control of these activities and tasks. Given this gap, this conceptual study attempts to argue the need for the investigation of L2 grit and FLE in light of control-value theory (CVT) and its methodological orientation. These arguments can pave the way for future research on this link via the CVT framework and provide pedagogical and methodological implications for investigators, learners, teachers, teacher educators, educational policy-makers, and advisors to raise their awareness of how the proximal determinants of enjoyment in learning a foreign language can be realized in terms of their perseverance of effort and consistency of interest in achievement activities.

This study sought to explore the association between English as a foreign language (EFL) students’ foreign language learning boredom (FLB) and foreign language enjoyment (FLE) (i.e., personal enjoyment, teacher appreciation, and social enjoyment) as well as the mediating role of student-perceived teacher humor styles (i.e., affiliative, self-enhancing, aggressive, and self-defeating). In doing so, we firstly investigated the relationship between 229 (67 male and 162 female) Turkish EFL university students’ FLB, FLE, and perceived teacher humor styles. We then probed to determine whether perceived teacher humor styles predict their FLB and FLE. The results indicated that all three indices of FLE had significant negative correlations with FLB. While affiliative and self-enhancing humor styles were significantly and positively correlated with FLE, they were negatively associated with FLB. Aggressive humor had only a significant negative correlation with the teacher appreciation subscale of FLE whereas self-defeating humor indicated a significant positive correlation with FLB. The results also showed that FLE could negatively predict FLB. Finally, the results of the mediation analysis indicated two significant mediation relationships which were significantly related to FLB through affiliative and self-enhancing humor. Implications are discussed in the context of teacher education.