An Empirical Study of College EFL Learners’ Flow and Anti-flow Experiences

Abstract

Learners’ emotions have long been regarded as an insignificant and irrational factor in the field of second language acquisition (SLA). In recent years, with the “affective turn” transpiring in applied linguistics, learners’ emotions have gained more scholarly attention, among which is language learners’ flow experience. Flow is one concept in psychology, which includes positive flow (e.g., enjoyment) and negative flow (also known as “anti-flow”, such as anxiety, boredom, etc.). At present, the bulk of the SLA research on English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners’ flow experience has been situated in the traditional teaching settings, while EFL learners’ flow experience in the blended teaching contexts remains under-investigated. In view of this, this study adopts a quantitative research method to probe into the flow and anti-flow experiences of 168 EFL learners in a certain application-oriented university in China. Results show that 1) The enjoyment experienced by learners is at a medium level, while boredom and anxiety are at a low level; 2) There are gender differences in learners’ emotional experience, but no grade difference has been found; 3) Enjoyment is significantly and negatively correlated with boredom and anxiety, and the latter two are significantly and positively correlated; 4) The three emotions can, to a certain degree, predict the self-perceived English proficiency and CET-4 scores. This article ends with the pedagogical implications of the research results for blended teaching and learning, and provides insights into the directions for future studies.