Abstract
Despite the ubiquity of boredom and its aversive effects in educational contexts, it has received scant attention from second/foreign language (L2) researchers until very recently. This article reports on one of the first empirical attempts to explore boredom in L2 learning and its sources in Chinese tertiary-level EFL contexts through eliciting responses of 1,502 university students to open-ended questions and conducting 16 individual semi-structured interviews. The qualitative data analysis revealed that participants perceived wide-ranging learner-internal and learner-external factors as sources of their foreign language learning boredom: (1) task characteristics, (2) teaching and learning activities, (3) student factors, (4) course content, (5) classroom factors, (6) teacher factors, and (7) feeling unoccupied in the class. Moreover, open-ended responses showed greater prominence of the first three categories of factors than others, lending support to the central role of control-value appraisals in inducing boredom, and suggesting situation-sensitive nature of boredom. Additionally, the study revealed that multiple factors, both learner-internal and learner-external, can interact and jointly shape control-value appraisals, which suggests the congruence between the person-in-context perspective on SLA and the control-value theory, and the potential to integrate the two approaches to extend L2 emotion research.
Funding source: The National Social Science Fund of China
Award Identifier / Grant number: 19CYY052
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on the early draft of this paper. We are grateful for all assisting teachers and student participants' participation. Thanks also go to Ms. Jiali Chen for her assistance in data analysis.
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Research funding: This work was supported by The National Social Science Fund of China (grant no. 19CYY052).
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Supplementary Material
The online version of this article offers supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/applirev-2021-0159).
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