Emotional incongruence enhances English vocabulary acquisition from instructional videos

The current study examined the impact of teacher’s facial expressions in instructional videos on students’ learning process and outcomes for English vocabulary with positive and negative valence. Participants, Chinese learners studying English as a foreign language (EFL) in China, learned 32 words from an instructional video in which a teacher displayed either positive or negative facial expressions. Our findings suggest that learners dwelled longer and fixated more on slides presenting negative vocabulary than on those with positive one. Additionally, learners dwelled longer and fixated more on the teacher when they displayed positive facial expressions compared to negative ones. It was also observed that students’ motivation to learn increased when the teacher displayed positive emotions, irrespective of the emotional valence of words. More importantly, when the teacher exhibited negative emotions while introducing positive words, learners showed improved immediate learning outcomes. When the teacher displayed positive emotions while introducing negative words, learners showed improved delayed learning outcomes. Results suggest that the emotional incongruence between teacher’s facial expressions and the emotional valence of English vocabulary enhanced both immediate and delayed learning outcomes. Therefore, teachers are encouraged to display emotions that not align with the emotional valence of the learning content in their instructional videos, especially when teaching vocabulary in an EFL setting.