Boredom and self-perceived learning achievement in postgraduate interpreting classes: the mediating roles of amotivation and engagement

ABSTRACT

Boredom has recently become a trending topic in applied linguistics studies. Despite the well-documented negative impacts of boredom on learning achievement, the intricate roles of motivational variables and engagement in mediating these effects remain under-explored. To address this gap, the present study employed structural equation modelling to investigate the relationships among boredom, amotivation, engagement, and self-perceived interpreting learning achievement. The study involved 336 postgraduates from 55 Chinese universities who are enrolled in Master of Translation and Interpreting programmes. The results reveal that: (1) all variables were strongly correlated with each other; (2) boredom exerted a medium to large overall negative effect and a small direct effect on self-perceived interpreting learning achievement; (3) engagement emerged as the predominant mediator of this predictive effect, both individually and in conjunction with amotivation; (4) amotivation, although positively predicted by boredom, did not directly predict self-perceived interpreting learning achievement within the model. This study underscores the importance of considering the interplay of factors while investigating the relationship between emotions and learning achievement. Situated within the context of postgraduate interpreting education, our study extends the theoretical assumptions and existing findings about boredom to a new domain of language learning.

KEYWORDS:

• Boredom
• learning achievement
• amotivation
• engagement
• interpreting education

Acknowledgements

We are deeply grateful to the reviewers for their valuable feedback and suggestions, which have greatly contributed to the improvement of our paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author contributions

Pingping Hu had the idea for the article and did the literature search; Pingping Hu and Jiashun Fan collaborated on the data collection; Pingping Hu drafted the manuscript; and all authors provided critical feedback on the work during revision.

Additional information

Funding

This research is supported by the Zhejiang Province Offline First Class Course ‘Business English Interpreting’ sponsored By Wenzhou Business College (grant number SJ2020YLKC10), Beijing Municipal Social Science Foundation (grant number 19YYB011), and Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications (grant number K2023-140).