How Skills-based Activities Shape Learners Foreign Language Enjoyment: A Mixed-modelling Longitudinal Examination

Abstract

A large proportion of research on foreign language emotions that has emerged in the last decade has focused on the relationship between foreign language enjoyment and various individual and contextual independent variables (Dewaele et al., 2021). Classroom activities have been discovered to be linked to Foreign Language Enjoyment (FLE) (Dewaele & MacIntyre, 2014). Although researchers have explored the enjoyment of classroom activities (Boudreau et al., 2018; Dao & Sato, 2021; Elahi Shirvan & Taherian, 2020, 2021; Li & Xu, 2019; Pan & Zhang, 2021; Li et al., 2020), little research has been carried out on how specific classroom activities involving speaking, listening, reading and writing shape FLE. This study examines how the enjoyment of certain skill-based activities changes over time and what factors contribute to its variances within and among English foreign language learners. It adopts a longitudinal mixed-method approach. Over nine months, repeated surveys were employed to track the enjoyment of classroom activities of 160 EFL adolescent learners from three grades in a Saudi secondary school. The survey included items for rating the enjoyment of speaking, reading, listening, and writing activities, as well as items for assessing the degree of collaboration, control, creativity, and authenticity linked with each activity (Csikszentmihalyi, 2008; De Bot, Lowie & Verspoor, 2007; Fredrickson, 2004; Pekrun, 2000). Four classroom observations, eight stimulated recall interviews, and ten semistructured interviews were conducted. A repeated analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed to investigate the differences in skill-specific enjoyment at different points in time. The primary statistical analysis was conducted via linear mixed-effects models (LMMs) by constructing random intercept and slope models. The ANOVA results showed significant differences in skill-specific enjoyment on the first data collection. LMMs revealed that only speaking enjoyment increased significantly over time while reading, listening, and writing enjoyment remained stable. Interestingly, intra-individual variation in the enjoyment of the four skills increased significantly over time. Moreover, learners' initial levels of enjoyment of the four skills varied considerably. Hence, while learners' enjoyment of speaking and listening continued to diverge by showing unique trajectories in the rate of change, their enjoyment of reading and writing remained relatively consistent with the group patterns. At the intra-individual level, collaboration was predictive of speaking enjoyment, creativity predicted speaking and reading enjoyment, whereas control contributed to writing enjoyment. At the inter-learner level, collaboration significantly contributed to the enjoyment of speaking, listening, and writing, control was predicative to reading enjoyment, while creativity only predicted speaking enjoyment. The enjoyment of skill-related activities was unaffected by authenticity. Both quantitative and qualitative findings suggest that the specific features (i.e., collaboration, control, creativity and authenticity) of the skill-based activities and other individual and contextual factors (i.e., games and competitions, interesting topics, teacher characteristics, practices and behaviours, engagement, learning progress and positive experiences, and emotional regulations) positively contribute to learners' enjoyment. The complex interactions between the different factors shape learners’ enjoyment of a specific activity. This study draws pedagogical implications from the findings, more specifically the development of classroom activities with positive features that lead to activity enjoyment.