The Impact of the Emotions of Happiness, Enjoyment, Anxiety, and Disappointment on Language Learners' Acquisition of a Second Language

Type of resource
Author/collaborator
Title
The Impact of the Emotions of Happiness, Enjoyment, Anxiety, and Disappointment on Language Learners' Acquisition of a Second Language
Abstract
The author’s research studied the impact of the positive emotions of happiness and enjoyment and the negative emotions of anxiety and disappointment on adult English language learners in a second language classroom. The author’s reason behind observing and studying these emotions, and their effect on the language learning process was to highlight the importance of the emotions of students in language classrooms, and to help the language learners in better understanding the role of their emotions when learning a second language. Her research methods used to obtain data involved the observation of students (participant observation) and questionnaires regarding the occurrence and impact of the positive and negative emotions being studied in this research. She found that the happiness and enjoyment had a positive and beneficial impact on the language learning process as these emotions made the learners feel motivated, determined, and enthusiastic towards achieving their learning objectives in the language classroom. On the other hand, anxiety and disappointment had a negative impact as they hindered the learning progress of learners and adversely impacted their self-confidence by discouraging and demotivating them to learn English. Some new findings were also revealed during the author’s research. Both positive and negative emotions seemed to coexist for each language class that were part of this research, and participants experienced both types of emotions within the same language class. Moreover, it was found that negative emotions were much harder to observe by the researcher as compared to positive emotions. Both these findings, in the author’s opinion, highlight the complexity of emotions. Since language learners are likely to experience a wide array of emotions in a language classroom, it is important that more research be conducted on different types of positive and negative emotions, along with their impact on the language learning process of students, in an SLA classroom.
Type
Master's Thesis
University
McGill University
Place
Montreal
Date
2024
# of Pages
116-[2]p.
URL
Language
en
Citation
Abbasi, Sanaa. “The Impact of the Emotions of Happiness, Enjoyment, Anxiety, and Disappointment on Language Learners’ Acquisition of a Second Language.” Master’s Thesis, McGill University, 2024. https://escholarship.mcgill.ca/concern/theses/jm214v98c.
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