Antecedents of Foreign Language Enjoyment (FLE) in the French Classroom

Antecedents of foreign language enjoyment (FLE) are important for practitioners and researchers to understand as FLE has been linked to important concepts like motivation and language achievement. The literature on antecedents is, however, rather scarce and overly dependent on top-down qualitative coding to fully understand this phenomenon. This report seeks to add to the knowledge of sources of FLE by investigating the antecedents of FLE in U.S. learners of French. The present study uses data collected from an open-ended survey and analyzed via an interpretive approach. The survey was sent out to students enrolled in undergraduate French courses at a large Southeastern university and a total of 50 participants responded to the questionnaire out of 183 directly solicited, for a response rate of 27%. The results revealed that content, teacher personality, and a sense of community were sources of FLE, with the sense of community taking the lion’s share of responses. This report argues that this sense of community, which was previously unattested in the literature, can be explained adequately within the second language and positive psychology (L2EPP) theory of emotions. Theoretical implications and future directions are discussed.