Flow Experiences During Speaking Tasks in the Hungarian English as a Foreign Language High School Classroom

Abstract

Positive psychology in education (Shernoff & Csíkszentmihályi, 2009) investigates what works well in the foreign language classroom in general, and what task types may lead to flow experiences (Piniel & Albert, 2019).To add to the discourse on the role of flow in language learning, the current study investigated task-specific flow related to speaking tasks in the Hungarian English as a Foreign Language high-school context with a conceptual and partial replication of Czimmermann and Piniel's (2016) research on task-specific flow. The research design closely built on the methods used in the initial study. We elicited data from 75 learners using the task-specific flow questionnaire on the same variety of task work modes (individual, pairwork, and groupwork) as in the initial study, but with a sole focus on oral tasks. Our results lend further support to the claim made by Czimmermann and Piniel (2016) that a large proportion of the learners are likely to experience flow in the classroom while completing language learning tasks. We also found empirical evidence underpinning the conceptual difference between the flow and anti-flow constructs, and a distinction between the various flow constituents. Unlike in the initial study, here we found the individual task to be associated with higher levels of flow in general; however, in terms of flow