A Study On The Correlation Between English Classroom Enjoyment And Perceived English Teacher Support For Senior High School Students

The National English Curriculum Standard for General Senior High Schools(2017/2020)states that the situation of students’ emotions during the process of English learning deserves educators’ attention as emotion is one of the important factors that affect students’ academics and individual development.Enjoyment is considered a positive high-arousal academic emotion,influenced by multiple factors such as individual,peer,and teacher.Among the influencing factors,teacher support is an important mechanism for fostering enjoyment(Lei et al.,2018).However,a review of the literature reveals a lack of research that combines both English classroom enjoyment and perceived English teacher support,demonstrating the necessity of achieving a more complete understanding of the current situation of senior high school students’ English classroom enjoyment and perceived English teacher support,as well as the correlation between them.Therefore,based on broaden-and-build theory,control-value theory,and self-determination theory,323 high school students from one provincial model senior high school in Liuzhou were taken as the research subjects in the present study to investigate the following three questions:(1)What is the general level of senior high school students’ English classroom enjoyment?(2)What is the overall situation of senior high school students’ perceived English teacher support?(3)Is there any correlation between senior high school students’ English classroom enjoyment and perceived English teacher support? If so,how?The present research uses a mixed approach with quantitative and qualitative methods.For one thing,English Classroom Enjoyment Scale(ECES)and Perceived English Teacher Support Scale(PETSS)are the quantitative tools adopted in the research to investigate the current level of senior high school students’ enjoyment and their perception of teacher support in EFL class,and then explore the correlation between the two variables.For another thing,semi-structured interviews are conducted in the research process to verify the validity of the data collected by questionnaires and to gain a further understanding of how senior high school students’ perceived English teacher support affects their enjoyment in EFL class.SPSS 26.0 is used to process quantitative data through descriptive statistics and Pearson correlation analysis;the qualitative data,namely,the semi-structured interviews,are transcribed and extracted keywords step by step.Based on the data analysis,the major findings of this study are as follows:(1)Senior high school students’ ECE is at a moderately high level.Their enjoyment of teacher support and their enjoyment of student support are both at high levels,while the enjoyment of English learning needs to be improved.(2)Senior high school students’ PETS in the EFL class is at a high level.Additionally,students perceived a lot of autonomy support and cognition support in EFL class,whereas their perceived emotion support is just slightly higher than medium level.(3)There is a high positive correlation between senior high school students’ ECE and PETS.Besides,the three dimensions of perceived English teacher support,including perceived emotion support,perceived autonomy support,and perceived cognition support,are all highly positively correlated with senior high school students’ ECE.Among them,perceived emotion support has the strongest positive correlation with students’ ECE.According to the above findings,pedagogical implications from the perspective of English teacher support are suggested in this thesis to promote senior high school students’ ECE.Teachers are expected to extend appropriate encouragement and praise to students,to guide them to discovere the charm of English learning,to provide students with more opportunities for autonomous and cooperative learning,and to assist students in improving their learning effectiveness and efficiency.