The Impact Of Senior High School Students’ Foreign Language Enjoyment On Agentic Engagement In English Learning

As a new dimension of student engagement,agentic engagement(AE)has attracted attention from scholars at home and abroad.Currently,this concept has entered the field of second language acquisition(SLA)and is considered to be the core of academic success.Thus,it is very important to explore the influencing factors to improve foreign language(FL)learners’ agentic engagement.Studies have shown that enjoyment,as one of the most common positive emotions in the field of SLA,can affect student engagement(Dewaele & Li,2021).However,few studies conducted in-depth research about the effect of enjoyment on AE.Also,most of the studies about AE were conducted among foreign language learners,with little among Chinese FL learners.So,to fill this gap and enrich the existing research,the author explores the mechanism of the impact of Chinese senior high school students’ foreign language enjoyment(FLE)on AE in English learning.The research questions are as follows:1.What is the status quo of senior high school students’ FLE?2.What is the status quo of senior high school students’ AE in English learning?3.Is there a correlation between senior high school students’ FLE and AE in English learning? If so,to what extent do they correlate with each other?4.Does senior high school students’ FLE predict AE? If so,which dimension of FLE is the strongest predictor?The study subjects were 457 senior high school students from a public high school in Shaanxi province.A combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods was adopted by sending questionnaires to students and conducting semi-structured interviews with randomly selected students.Descriptive statistics,correlation analysis,and multiple regression analysis were conducted with SPSS 26.0 for the quantitative data;the qualitative data were sorted,transcribed,and analyzed.The results are as follows:1.Overall,Chinese senior high school students’ FLE level is lower than that of international high school students and also lower than that of domestic college students.Specifically,students’ FLE mainly comes from teachers and least from learners.2.Chinese senior high school students show different levels in different dimensions of AE in English learning.The level of engagement in self-study is the highest,followed by the level of cooperation with teachers and helping teachers teach,while the level of helping students learn is the lowest.3.There is a significant positive correlation between Chinese senior high school students’ FLE and AE in English learning.4.Senior high school students’ FLE has a positive predictive effect on their AE in English learning,among which FLE-individual has the strongest predictive ability.With reference to the above results,this study provides relevant suggestions for inservice English teachers and educational policy makers aiming to further improve senior high school students’ FLE to increase AE in English learning.