A Study Of Ethnic Minority Middle School Students’ Foreign Language Enjoyment And Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety

Since 1970 s,research on affect and emotions especially negative ones such as anxiety has been booming in the field of SLA(Dewaele et al.,2018).With the introduction of positive psychology into SLA,interests in research on positive emotions,enjoyment in particular,experienced by foreign language learners have been vibrant in the past few years.A good deal of empirical studies has been done to examine foreign language classroom anxiety(FLCA)and foreign language enjoyment(FLE)simultaneously in different target groups overseas.In recent years,China has also seen a growing number of studies on FLE and FLCA,but little is known about ethnic minority middle school students’ FLE and FLCA.To address this gap,the present study aimed to explore the profiles of ethnic minority middle school students’ FLE and FLCA,and the relationship between the two emotions.A total of 592 trilingual or quadrilingual ethnic minority middle school students from five rural middle schools located in the ethnic regions of Naxi,Dai,Bai,and Yi in Yunan Province completed the questionnaire.Among them,177 were Naxi students,153 were Dai students,127 were Yi students,113 were Bai students and together with22 students from Jingpo,Lisu,A’chang and De’ang.Quantitative and qualitative data were collected via a composite questionnaire,SPSS 21 was applied to analyze quantitative data,and Nvivo 11 was adopted to compute qualitative data.The major findings revealed that:(1)the levels of participants’ FLE and FLCA were at a medium level.As for the three dimensions of FLE,the enjoyment of student support and the enjoyment of teacher support were at a high level.As for the three dimensions of FLCA,all of them were at a medium level,and the level of test anxiety was the highest.Moreover,with a medium level of effect size,participants experienced higher levels of FLE than FLCA.(2)A significantly negative relationship existed between ethnic minority middle school students’ FLE and FLCA,and only 9.9%variance shared by the two emotions,so FLE and FLCA were two separate dimensions.FLE was correlated with all the dimensions of FLCA,test anxiety in particular.In terms of the relationship of FLCA and the three dimensions of FLE,except the enjoyment of student support,the other two dimensions of FLE were correlated with FLCA,that is,the enjoyment of English leaning and the enjoyment of teacher support.(3)there was gender difference on FLE,and females enjoyed more fun in class than males.However,no gender difference on FLCA was found.(4)According to participants’ descriptions of FLE and FLCA,FLE was more related to teacher variables,while FLCA was more easily to be triggered by students’ internal variables.Several practical implications for ethnic minority trilingual or quadrilingual middle school students’ English learning and teaching are given.Meanwhile,not only the limitations of present study were offered,but also some suggestions are listed at the end of this thesis.