The Development and Validation of the English Writing Enjoyment Scale.

To develop the English Writing Enjoyment Scale, I surveyed 30 Chinese-as-First-Language university students of English (Group 1) through a self-narrative inquiry that included but was not limited to psychological, motivational, behavioral, cognitive, and physiological factors. Using a grounded theory approach to analyzing the participants' self-reports, I extracted 30 thematic categories. From the 11 categories that were most often endorsed, I developed the English Writing Enjoyment Scale and subjected it next to other psychometric analyses using three other groups of larger samples of university students. This included first a Principal Components Analysis (Group 2: n = 220) and then a Confirmatory Factor Analysis (Group 3: n = 357) that narrowed the instrument to 9-items with satisfactory internal reliability and construct validity. Finally, I conducted correlational analyses between this instrument and four other measures in and outside second language acquisition research (Group 4: n = 62). I discuss these findings and their implications and outline directions for further research.

Unpacking the interaction between foreign language learners' emotion, cognition, and activity in the flipped classroom in higher education: A perezhivanie perspective.

Few studies have investigated learners' emotional experiences and the interactions between emotion, cognition, and activity in the flipped foreign language classroom (i.e., a mixed teaching mode that combines in-class teaching and off-class self-directed learning). This study, from the perspective of perezhivanie (a concept from sociocultural theory), addressed these research gaps by exercising a longitudinal narrative study on a total of 32 Chinese-as-the-first-language university students of English who attended a 15-week English course with this teaching design. Among them, eight focal students were randomly selected for further evidence of the characteristics of the interactions between emotion, cognition, and activity. The results showed that the participants experienced more of positive emotions than negative emotions in the flipped classroom (FC) context, which supports the efficacy of the pedagogy. But most importantly, complex interactions between emotion, cognition, and activity were revealed. Generally, (negative) positive emotion, cognition, and activity were interconnected; however, what is also evident is that learners' emotions either promoted or inhibited their cognitive functions, and positive and negative emotions did not necessarily correspond to positive and negative activities, respectively. This is due to the presence of dynamic, developmental, and historical sociocultural mediators in learners perezhivanija, be it teacher, peers, technology, teaching materials, teaching activities in an FC, or the learners' previous English learning anecdotes, etc.

Contracting Students for the Reduction of Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety: An Approach Nurturing Positive Mindsets and Behaviors.

The quasi-experimental study reported in this paper investigated whether contracting students' speaking in the foreign language (FL) classroom could effectively mitigate their FL classroom anxiety. It also explored the working mechanisms of this approach to the reduction of classroom anxiety and examined the attitudes FL students had toward it. To these ends, 42 Chinese-as-the-first-language university students learning English as a foreign language (EFL) were recruited and placed into the experimental (n = 20) and comparison groups (n = 22). Both groups were tested for anxiety before and after completing a 1-week contract and a non-contracting treatment, respectively. The experimental group participants' diaries were also collected, and their attitudes toward the intervention were elicited. Results showed that the experimental group's level of anxiety decreased significantly more as compared with that of the comparison group, suggesting the better efficacy of contracting speaking in FL anxiety reduction. Diary analyses also suggested that contracting speaking could increase learners' FL learning engagement; enhance their self-efficacy; facilitate their self-reflection of weaknesses and strengths as an FL learner; cultivate their character strengths and positive emotions; and diminish their fear, nervousness, and worries in class. Furthermore, the experimental group participants generally did not feel uncomfortable with the intervention. These findings were discussed in relation to classroom pedagogy for more effective delivery of FL education.

A Comparative Study of Two Scales for Foreign Language Classroom Enjoyment.

This article reports on a study that tested Jin and Zhang's Chinese version of the Foreign Language Enjoyment Scale for classroom learning through confirmatory factor analysis and compared the resulting scale with Li, Jiang, and Dewaele's 11-item scale. Four hundred five Chinese first language senior high school students of English in years 1-3 participated in this study. We found that Jin and Zhang's version of the Foreign Language Enjoyment Scale could be reduced to a 16-item scale that preserved the same factor structure as the original scale. This revised 16-item scale showed a more solid dimensional division and better psychometric properties than Li et al.'s scale. We discussed our findings in relation to the scale's wider application for improving foreign language teaching and learning.