A Study Of The Correlation Between Senior High School Students’ English Learning Boredom And Their English Achievement From The Perspective Of Control-Value Theory

Boredom is a prevalent emotion among students regardless of their educational levels.Plenty of studies have confirmed that emotions have an impact on students‘achievement through cognitive mechanisms.However,boredom has received relatively little attention in English learning classrooms of senior high schools in China.The control-value theory(CVT)of achievement emotions provides a sound tool for boredom to be studied in the foreign language teaching and learning contexts.For this reason,this study,based on the CVT,intends to find out the general profiles of boredom among the senior high school students in China,and the correlation between the students‘boredom and their English learning achievement.To be specific,this research aims to answer the following research questions:1)What are the profiles of the senior high school students‘English learning boredom?2)What is the correlation between the students‘English learning boredom and their English achievement?In this study,a mixed-method approach is employed.Questionnaires are mainly used to retrieve quantitative data.Additionally,classroom observations and informal interviews are adopted to obtain qualitative data in order for the quantitative results to be complemented.A series of careful analyses of all the data have led to the following conclusions.Firstly,boredom prevails among the students in their English learning.It is shown that the mean value of the students‘overall English learning boredom is 2.74,which indicates that the students have in general a low to medium degree of boredom.However,the degrees of boredom that the students perceive in their English learning vary from dimension to dimension.Specifically,the students have a low to medium degree in English classroom boredom(M=2.84)and over-challenging or meaningless boredom(M=2.7).The students have a medium degree of boredom in under-challenging boredom(M=2.99),Power Point presentation boredom(M=4.10),and homework boredom(M=3.04).Lastly,the students have a low degree of boredom in teacher-dislike boredom(M=1.8)and general learning trait boredom(M=2.02).Besides,there are gender differences among the perceived boredom,namely,the male students experience a higher degree than female students in the overall English learning boredom,homework boredom,teacher-dislike boredom,and over-challenging or meaningless boredom,with the effect sizes(Cohen‘s d)being 0.37,0.59,0.42,and 0.47 respectively.According to the effect size classifications in L2 domains,the effect sizes of gender differences are small.Yet there is no age difference found in this study.Furthermore,the qualitative research proves that curricula,fatigue of the students,teaching approaches,classroom management,and textbooks might contribute to boredom,too.Secondly,the correlation and regression analyses demonstrate that there are negative correlations between various dimensions of the students‘English learning boredom and their English achievement.In general,there is a negative correlation between the students‘overall English learning boredom and their English achievement(r=-.43).To be specific,similar findings also appear in English classroom boredom(r=-.49),under-challenging boredom(r=-.31),homework boredom(r=-.32),general learning trait boredom(r=-.23),and over-challenging boredom or meaningless task boredom(r=-.27).It should be noted that in the regression analysis,only English classroom boredom can directly predict English achievement,~2=.24,meaning that English classroom boredom can predict and explain 24%of the variance of English achievement.