Longitudinal examination of university students’ foreign language enjoyment and foreign language classroom anxiety in the course of general English: latent growth curve modeling

ABSTRACT

Dewaele and MacIntyre. [2016. ‘Foreign language enjoyment and foreign language classroom anxiety: The right and left feet of the language learner.’ In Positive psychology in SLA, edited by T. Gregersen, P. D. MacIntyre, and S. Mercer, 215–236. Bristol: Multilingual Matters] asserted that foreign language classroom anxiety (FLCA) and foreign language enjoyment (FLE) are the learners’ metaphorical left and right feet on their journey to acquiring the foreign language. The purpose of this longitudinal study was to investigate the growth as well as changing trends of university students’ FLE and FLCA in a course of general English using latent growth curve modeling (LGCM) as well as a triangulation of data collection. To do this, we analyzed data collected from 367 undergraduate students during a semester in a course of general English in the LGCM phase and four participants in the qualitative phase. The findings indicated that while the participants’ FLE increased significantly, their level of FLCA decreased during the semester. However, the significance of the intercept and slope variances for both variables implied heterogeneity in the participants’ growth in FLE and FLCA over the semester. In addition, the initial levels of both FLE and FLCA could not predict their growth during the semester. Furthermore, at the beginning of the semester, the significant negative correlation between students’ FLE and FLCA was low but during the semester the negative correlation between the two variables turned out to be high; however, the qualitative findings indicated moments of experiencing high levels of FLE and FLCA and moments of going through low levels of FLE and FLCA at the same time by the learners. The pedagogical implications of the findings are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Foreign language enjoyment
• foreign language classroom anxiety
• latent growth curve modeling
• general English

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Majid Elahi Shirvan is Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics at University of Bojnord, Iran. He specializes in the ecology of psychological aspects of language learning and teaching.

Tahereh Taherian is a Ph.D. candidate of Applied Linguistics at Yazd University. Her main research interest is research on the ecology of language learning and teaching.

Notes

1 All figures regarding the participants’ growth of ELE and FLCA in four sessions as well as the relationship between each participant’s FLE and FLCA in each session except those in the paper are presented in the appendix.