Original title: Enjoyment and anxiety in second language communication: An idiodynamic approach
The researchers studied university students speaking French as a second language. After each oral task, students watched a video of themselves and rated how their enjoyment and anxiety changed each second. They then explained what they thought caused those changes. Enjoyment and anxiety did not always move in opposite directions: their relationship shifted between negative and positive.
Imagine carrying out a long cooking task while keeping track of how enjoyable and stressful each moment feels. Some moments may be enjoyable and stressful at once, while in others one feeling rises as the other falls. In this paper, students track those two feelings second by second while watching their recorded speaking tasks, then explain what they think caused the changes.
For people learning to speak another language, emotions may change from moment to moment rather than act like a fixed trait. Seeing when enjoyment and anxiety rise or fall together could help explain why the same speaking task feels different at different points.
The abstract describes university students who speak French as a second language completing oral tasks. It does not report how many students took part, whether the findings apply to other learners or languages, or whether tracking these emotions changes speaking or learning outcomes.
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Enjoyment and anxiety in second language communication: An idiodynamic approach — Carmen Boudreau, Peter D. MacIntyre, Jean‐Marc Dewaele — Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching — doi:10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.1.7
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.