Learners’ emotions in foreign language text chats with native speakers

Abstract

The paper examines the emotions of 15 learners of Japanese across seven weekly online text chats in Japanese with native Japanese speakers, and the factors that caused their emotions. The data came from questionnaires about the learners’ biodata and previous experiences of text chats, weekly reports about their chats, transcripts of the chats, and occasional questions in e-mail exchanges between the researcher and the learners to clarify certain statements in the weekly reports. The learners’ positive and negative emotions and the causes of those emotions were coded and counted for descriptive quantitative analysis. The learners reported both positive and negative emotions within each individual chat as well as across the seven weeks. Enjoyment was the most frequently occurring of the positive emotions, while a sense of difficulty was most often reported among the negative emotions. Both positive and negative emotions changed over the seven weeks. The chat process and issues with the Japanese language tended to be triggers for negative emotions, with positive emotions likely to be triggered by the chat partners, and also by discussions of hobbies, similar interests and culture. It would appear to be important for learners to develop a rapport with their partner through chat communications and to avoid focusing too much on their own limited foreign language proficiency in order to increase their positive emotions in online text chats, thus improving the experience and leading to greater learning.

Keywords:

• Emotions
• factors that caused the emotions
• Japanese language learning
• online text chats

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 See Table 1 for details of the participants.

2 While an English lecturer cooperated in the present chat project, he was not a specialist in emotions in FL learning, and participated in the project only for teaching and learning purposes. Thus the data analysis was not discussed with him but with another researcher.

3 Because multiple coding was permitted, learners’ comments about having enjoyed a chat because they had progressed in their language proficiency were coded as both enjoyment and sense of progress.

4 Kanji are the Chinese characters used in written Japanese.

5 Hiragana is the basic Japanese alphabet. Katakana is equivalent, but used mainly for expressions borrowed from other languages.

6 Remember that individual emotions can be multiply coded for cause, so there are more instances of causes than instances of emotions.

7 Keigo, or honorific language, is something that the learners were focusing on in lessons.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Reiko Yoshida

Dr. Reiko Yoshida is a lecturer in Japanese at University of South Australia. She was awarded her PhD in 2008. For her PhD study, she examined corrective feedback and learners' private speech in Japanese language classes. During her PhD, she published articles in several internationally refereed journals. Her book based on her PhD study 'Learners in Japanese Language Classrooms: Overt and Covert Participation' was published in 2009. She joined the University of South Australia in 2010 and has been coordinating and teaching Japanese courses from beginners to intermediate levels including Japanese In-Country course. She has been researching Japanese language learners' self-concepts in relation to their beliefs about language learning and motivation since 2010. Findings in the research has been published in journal articles as book chapters. Since 2018, she has been carrying out a project about emotions of Japanese language learners in online text chats with Japanese native speakers to explore relationship between foreign-language (FL) learning emotions and synchronous computer-mediated communications (SCMCs). Her research interests include classroom interactions, learners' beliefs about language learning, motivation, study abroad, FL self-concept, FL learning emotions and SCMCs.