A Study On Teacher-Related Factors Of Junior High School Students’ English Classroom Enjoyment

As positive psychology has been advancing by leaps and bounds,a "positive turn"occurred concerning emotional researches in the field of second language acquisition.An increasing number of scholars have gradually attached primary importance to learners’positive emotions and their influential factors in the course of language learning.As one of the most common positive emotions experienced by learners during the learning process,Foreign Language(Classroom)Enjoyment can be conducive to their language learning.More significantly,it can also exert a profound influence on the learners’ willingness to communicate as well as a prediction of their academic performance.English Classroom Enjoyment tends to be influenced by internal factors including learners’ character,their English proficiency levels,their attitudes towards English,etc.,and external factors such as teacher-related factors,classroom atmosphere,social and cultural background.Of all these internal and external variables,the English teacher plays a prominent role in influencing learners’ English Classroom Enjoyment.Thus,it is extremely valuable and vital to comprehensively examine teacher-related factors in learners’ enjoyment in the course of language learning.With regard to the existing literature on learners’ English Classroom Enjoyment,however,the studies outside China are far more in-depth and mature in comparison with the pertinent ones at home.Furthermore,the teacher-related factors of these studies have analyzed mostly teachers’ inherent traits as opposed to the contextual factors inextricably involved in teaching.In addition,the analysis of teacher-related variables in previous researches is more or less conducted from the scholar’s perspective,with the result that the learner’s perspective or the teacher’s perspective has been paid scant attention,let alone the comparison between students’ and teachers’ beliefs regarding the influence of teacher-related factors on learners’ English Classroom Enjoyment.Hence,for the purpose of enriching the research field,a teacher-student comparison perspective was adopted and 269 second-year students and 12 English teachers in a junior high school in Zhangzhou City,Fujian Province were selected as the participants to systematically explore the teacher-related factors of English Classroom Enjoyment of junior high school students,using focal writing as the main focus and semi-structure interview as the supplement.To be specific,the research questions addressed in this study are:1)What is the current level of junior high school students’ English Classroom Enjoyment?2)What teacher-related factors influence junior high school students’ English Classroom Enjoyment?What categories do these factors belong to?3)What are the similarities and differences in students’ and teachers’ beliefs regarding the influence of teacher-related factors in learners’English Classroom Enjoyment?And why?Questionnaires and interviews were used to conduct this study,followed by quantitative and qualitative analyses of the data collected from the questionnaires through SPSS 16.0 and NVivol 1,and the results obtained are shown below.It was found that the overall mean value of English Classroom Enjoyment among junior high school students was 54.51 and the mean value of enjoyment in this study was 3.52,which needs to be improved;in addition,through open-ended coding and axial coding of the focal writing pieces of the participants,it was found that there were 24 teacher-related factors on junior high school students’ English Classroom Enjoyment,which could be attributed to Teaching Activities(21%),Teacher Support(17.2%),Teacher’s Personalities and Characteristics(15.3%),Teaching Skills(14.9%),Teaching Content(8.0%),Teacher Literacy(11.5%)and Teaching Emotions(11.9%)in seven categories.Comparatively,all the students and the teachers had similar beliefs in teacher-related factors exerting influences on junior high school students’ English Classroom Enjoyment given the fact that English class is a relatively stable ecosystem.Nonetheless,the significance of each category was different,particularly with regard to Teacher’s Personalities and Characteristics,Teacher Literacy and Teaching Emotions,for three reasons that can be explained in terms of students’psychological characteristics,academic pressure and the exsisting English classroom teaching model.In view of the research findings,some pedagogical implications are proposed to achieve beneficial results on junior high school students’ English Classroom Enjoyment.Firstly,teachers should pay more attention to learners’ English Classroom Enjoyment and take teacher-related factors into account;Secondly,teachers should interact closely with students to create a comfortable and efficient learning environment.Finally,teachers should make continuous efforts to polish their own personality traits,improve their teacher literacy,and maintain positive emotions in their teaching.