Reducing anxiety in the foreign language classroom: A positive psychology approach

As research on savoring has increased dramatically since publication of the book Savoring: A New Model of Positive Experience (Bryant and Veroff, 2007), savoring has gradually become a core concept in positive psychology. I begin by reviewing the evolution of this concept, the development of instruments for assessing savoring ability and savoring strategies, and the wide range of applications of savoring in the psychosocial and health sciences. I then consider important directions for future theory and research. To advance our understanding of how naturalistic savoring unfolds over time, future work should integrate the perceptual judgments involved in not only the later stages of attending to and regulating positive experience (where past research has concentrated), but also the initial stages of searching for and noticing positive stimuli. Whereas most research has investigated reactive savoring, which occurs spontaneously in response to positive events or feelings, future work is also needed on proactive savoring, which begins with the deliberate act of seeking out or creating positive stimuli. To advance the measurement of savoring-related constructs, I recommend future work move beyond retrospective self-report methods toward the assessment of savoring as it occurs in real-time. The development of new methods of measuring meta-awareness and the regulation of attentional focus are crucial to advancing our understanding of savoring processes. I review recent research on the neurobiological correlates of savoring and suggest future directions in which to expand such work. I highlight the need for research aimed at unraveling the developmental processes through which savoring skills and deficits evolve and the role that savoring impairments play in the etiology and maintenance of psychopathology. Research is also needed to learn more about what enhances savoring, and to disentangle how people regulate the intensity versus duration of positive emotions. Finally, I encourage future researchers to integrate the study of anticipation, savoring the moment, and reminiscence within individuals across time.

Section: Historical Evolution Of the Concept And Measurement Of Savoringmentioning

confidence: 99%

Current Progress and Future Directions for Theory and Research on Savoring

Bryant

2021

“…Therefore, instructional strategies could be tailored to ease learners' anxiety about CFL learning and train them to develop self-regulating strategies for learning a foreign language online. A supportive and positive instructional approach can reduce learners' language learning anxiety (Young, 1991 ; Vogely, 1998 ; Oxford, 2017 ; Jin et al, 2021 ). If instructors are working in less developed countries, they should consider the local culture when taking targeted measures to address anxiety.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The roles of motivation, anxiety and learning strategies in online Chinese learning among Thai learners of Chinese as a foreign language

Zhang

Sukjairungwattana

et al. 2022

The impact of motivation, anxiety and learning strategies on the achievement of foreign language proficiency has been widely acknowledged in the context of traditional offline classroom settings. However, this issue has not been extensively documented in relation to online learning, which has become the predominant form of language learning during the period of the COVID-19 pandemic. The current study was conducted to investigate the relative prediction of motivation, anxiety and learning strategies for second language achievement among 90 Thai adult learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) who took online Chinese courses. The participants completed a questionnaire dealing with motivation, anxiety, learning strategies, and their Chinese proficiency was measured by self-report and a Chinese vocabulary size test. A series of hierarchical regression analyses revealed two major findings. First, anxiety emerged as the most stable factor for the participants' CFL achievement, followed by learning strategies and motivation. Second, motivation, anxiety and learning strategies only significantly predicted the participants' self-rated Chinese language proficiency, but not their performance on the Chinese vocabulary size test. The overall results indicate the relative importance of motivation, anxiety and learning strategies to Chinese language learning in the online environment and suggest different measures of CFL achievement may lead to different research findings. The general findings were of theoretical and pedagogical significance for understanding and addressing individual differences factors in online language learning.

“…Thus, the teacher’s goal is never to erase learners’ negative emotions, which is also impossible, as negative emotions are inevitable part of learning. Instead, they should find ways to limit learners’ negative emotions to the point that negative emotions do not overwhelm the positive ones ( Jin et al, 2021 ). To this end, exercising the FC pedagogy seems to be effective.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unpacking the interaction between foreign language learners’ emotion, cognition, and activity in the flipped classroom in higher education: A perezhivanie perspective

Qin

Yao²,

Jin³

2022

Self Cite

Few studies have investigated learners’ emotional experiences and the interactions between emotion, cognition, and activity in the flipped foreign language classroom (i.e., a mixed teaching mode that combines in-class teaching and off-class self-directed learning). This study, from the perspective of perezhivanie (a concept from sociocultural theory), addressed these research gaps by exercising a longitudinal narrative study on a total of 32 Chinese-as-the-first-language university students of English who attended a 15-week English course with this teaching design. Among them, eight focal students were randomly selected for further evidence of the characteristics of the interactions between emotion, cognition, and activity. The results showed that the participants experienced more of positive emotions than negative emotions in the flipped classroom (FC) context, which supports the efficacy of the pedagogy. But most importantly, complex interactions between emotion, cognition, and activity were revealed. Generally, (negative) positive emotion, cognition, and activity were interconnected; however, what is also evident is that learners’ emotions either promoted or inhibited their cognitive functions, and positive and negative emotions did not necessarily correspond to positive and negative activities, respectively. This is due to the presence of dynamic, developmental, and historical sociocultural mediators in learners perezhivanija, be it teacher, peers, technology, teaching materials, teaching activities in an FC, or the learners’ previous English learning anecdotes, etc.