A Correlation Study Of Senior High School Students’ Foreign Language Enjoyment,Foreign Language Boredom And English Achievement

Enjoyment and boredom have become the latest research hotspots besides anxiety recently.Studies have shown that foreign language enjoyment(FLE)is positively correlated with English achievement and foreign language boredom(FLB)is negatively related to English achievement.Moreover,FLE is negatively correlated with FLB.Literature review shows that there are scant studies have been conducted on the enjoyment and boredom of Chinese English learners,and few studies have combined the two emotions.In addition,research on boredom is rarely conducted on high school students.Thus,this study takes the Broaden-and-Build theory and the Control-Value theory as guiding theories to explore the general situation of senior high school students’ FLE and FLB and the relationships among students’ FLE,FLB,and English achievement,and investigate the predictive effect of these two emotions on English achievement.It also explores the significant differences between the two emotions in demographic variables.Using a mixed method,this research investigated 252 Year 10 students from a high school in Yuxi City of Yunnan Province.Questionnaires and face-to-face semistructured interviews were used to collect relevant data.The study used SPSS 22.0 to analyze the questionnaire data.Factor Analysis,Frequency Statistics,Descriptive Statistics,Correlation Analysis,Linear Stepwise Regression,T-test,and One-Way ANOVA Analysis were conducted in this study.At the same time,through face-to-face interviews with five students,the collected qualitative data were processed using the method of the meaning unit.The major findings of the study are as follows:(1)Year 10 students had a moderately high level of FLE but a low level of FLB;(2)Year 10 students’ FLE demonstrated a low to moderate positive correlation with English achievement,while FLB was negatively weakly correlated with English achievement.Moreover,a moderate negative correlation was found between FLE and FLB,and three factors of FLE and five factors of FLB showed a low to moderate negative correlation;(3)Among FLE’s three factors,FLEP and FLET were important predictors of English achievement,while among the five factors of FLB,only HB had the predictive effect on English achievement.However,when the two emotions entered the same regression model,only FLE had the significant predictive power on English achievement;(4)FLE had significant differences in the two demographic variables: family location and self-rated English proficiency,while the significant difference was only found between FLB and students’ self-rated English proficiency.Based on the above research results,this study takes the Broaden-and-Build theory and the Control-Value theory as guiding theories,which provides enlightenment for the study of FLE and FLB.In addition,this study explains the emotional impact on English achievement to teachers and students,which highlights the function of emotion and offers inspiration for English teaching quality and efficiency.At last,this study provides suggestions for future research based on the existing limitations of this study.