Longitudinal examination of university students’ foreign language enjoyment and foreign language classroom anxiety in the course of general English: latent growth curve modeling

Dewaele and MacIntyre. [2016. ‘Foreign language enjoyment and foreign language classroom anxiety: The right and left feet of the language learner.’ In Positive psychology in SLA, edited by T. Gregersen, P. D. MacIntyre, and S. Mercer, 215–236. Bristol: Multilingual Matters] asserted that foreign language classroom anxiety (FLCA) and foreign language enjoyment (FLE) are the learners’ metaphorical left and right feet on their journey to acquiring the foreign language. The purpose of this longitudinal study was to investigate the growth as well as changing trends of university students’ FLE and FLCA in a course of general English using latent growth curve modeling (LGCM) as well as a triangulation of data collection. To do this, we analyzed data collected from 367 undergraduate students during a semester in a course of general English in the LGCM phase and four participants in the qualitative phase. The findings indicated that while the participants’ FLE increased significantly, their level of FLCA decreased during the semester. However, the significance of the intercept and slope variances for both variables implied heterogeneity in the participants’ growth in FLE and FLCA over the semester. In addition, the initial levels of both FLE and FLCA could not predict their growth during the semester. Furthermore, at the beginning of the semester, the significant negative correlation between students’ FLE and FLCA was low but during the semester the negative correlation between the two variables turned out to be high; however, the qualitative findings indicated moments of experiencing high levels of FLE and FLCA and moments of going through low levels of FLE and FLCA at the same time by the learners. The pedagogical implications of the findings are discussed.