Learners’ emotions in foreign language text chats with native speakers

Abstract

The paper examines the emotions of 15 learners of Japanese across seven weekly online text chats in Japanese with native Japanese speakers, and the factors that caused their emotions. The data came from questionnaires about the learners’ biodata and previous experiences of text chats, weekly reports about their chats, transcripts of the chats, and occasional questions in e-mail exchanges between the researcher and the learners to clarify certain statements in the weekly reports. The learners’ positive and negative emotions and the causes of those emotions were coded and counted for descriptive quantitative analysis. The learners reported both positive and negative emotions within each individual chat as well as across the seven weeks. Enjoyment was the most frequently occurring of the positive emotions, while a sense of difficulty was most often reported among the negative emotions. Both positive and negative emotions changed over the seven weeks. The chat process and issues with the Japanese language tended to be triggers for negative emotions, with positive emotions likely to be triggered by the chat partners, and also by discussions of hobbies, similar interests and culture. It would appear to be important for learners to develop a rapport with their partner through chat communications and to avoid focusing too much on their own limited foreign language proficiency in order to increase their positive emotions in online text chats, thus improving the experience and leading to greater learning.