The effects of student and teacher variables on anxiety, enjoyment, and boredom among Chinese high school EFL learners

ABSTRACT

Recently, there is a surge of interest in a wide range of learner emotions in the SLA field, underlining a holistic perspective of language learning emotions. The present study examines the relationships between the three prevalent emotions among language learners – foreign language enjoyment (FLE), foreign language anxiety (FLA), and foreign language boredom (FLB) – and their potential correlates including a set of learner-internal and teacher-related variables among a specific sample of Chinese high school students. When it comes to the links among the three emotions, we found that FLE was negatively correlated with FLA and FLB, while FLA and FLB were positively correlated. Various learner-internal (gender, age, attitude towards the FL, attitude towards the teacher, self-perceived achievement, relative standing in class) and teacher-related variables (teacher enthusiasm, friendliness, strictness, frequency of FL use, foreign accent, frequency of joke, unpredictability) were found to be related with the three emotions to a different degree. In addition, the positive emotion of FLE was found to be more related to teacher-related variables than the negative emotions of FLA and FLB.

KEYWORDS:

• Learner-internal variables
• teacher variables
• foreign language enjoyment
• foreign language anxiety
• foreign language boredom

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

I would like to acknowledge [The 2.0 project of top-notch talents cultivation, China's Ministry of Education (Grant No. 20222121)], as they were instrumental in supporting the research presented in the article.