A Study Of Academic Emotion Of English Majors In A "BA Thesis Design" Course

Guided by Pekrun's academic emotion theory,this qualitative case study aims to investigate the academic emotion experiences of a group of English majors in a "BA Thesis Design" Course.Also,it explored effects of these emotion experiences on students'learning and factors that influence their emotions.The research data were mainly collected from interviews,classroom observation and course products.Based on data analysis,the major findings of this study are summarized as follows:Firstly,the students experienced both positive and negative academic emotions in different stages of the course learning.In the "Formulating the problem" stage,positive emotion enjoyment and negative emotion boredom were most evident,while in the"Analyzing the problem" stage positive emotion relief and negative emotion confusion appeared more frequently.After entering the third stage,most reported were positive emotions such as hope and pride,and negative emotion anxiety.Secondly,this study confirmed the findings in the literature that academic emotions posed important effects on students' course learning by mediating their motivational and cognitive mechanisms,thus benefiting or hampering their learning performances.Positive academic emotions facilitated students' learning by strengthening both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to learn and activating the use of suitable learning strategies.One exception is relief,which was reported to pose negative effects on students' learning by undermining their extrinsic motivation in the short run.However,negative academic emotions posed both negative and positive effects on students' learning.They undermined the intrinsic motivation,produced irrelevant thoughts to distract students' attention and occupy their memory capacity for storing learning information.Meanwhile they also strengthened the extrinsic motivation and activated the sense of students' self-regulation to plan,monitor,evaluate their own learning,and adapt learning strategies to learning demands to facilitate learning.Thirdly,this study found some personal and environmental factors influencing students' academic emotions.Among three personal factors(self-efficacy,learning experience and learning goals),previous learning experiences had important influences on students' academic emotions in the first stage of the course learning.Students who didn't do well in past English writing courses showed more negative emotions at the beginning of the course than those who did well in such courses.Learning goals played a significant role in influencing students' emotions in the last stage of learning.Students experienced more positive emotions,such as pride,when they successfully achieved the goals at the end of the course.And high self-efficacy brought students positive emotions during the course learning.Among two environmental factors(course-related and people-related factors),both clear and timely instruction from teachers and positive feedback from teacher and peers fostered students' positive emotions,whereas high task difficulty and achievement pressure of this course induced negative emotions in students.Based on the above findings,this study draws some implications for both teachers and students in the similar contexts.The course instructors should pay more attention to students' emotion experiences,arrange more interactive activities in the class and control the difficulty of the tasks and course contents.At the same time,students should be alert to their emotion changes and learn to manage their negative emotions by various ways in the learning process.