Is It All That Positive? An Exploratory Study of Emotions in the Older Adult In-Person and Online EFL Classrooms

Late-life foreign language education (i.e., FL geragogy, FLG) is said to be related to the de- lay of age-related cognitive changes in healthy individuals and has been shown to positively affect the quality of life of older adults, the fastest-growing age group worldwide. These are also the two main reasons which seem to be behind the high enrolment rates for FL courses at the Universities of the Third Age (U3A) and senior centres alike. Nowadays, following the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic and months spent in the emergency remote teaching, some of the older learners decided to continue their ed- ucation online, others came back to the classrooms. In both cases, the research on third age learner emotions remains rather scarce, despite a gradually increasing interest of applied linguists in this age group. The aim of this paper is thus to bridge the gap between FLG and Positive Language Education (Mercer et al.) by discerning the reasons behind the learners’ choice of in-person or online classes and investigating the emotions experienced in both modes. To this end, the qualitative research was conducted in two groups of older adult English as a FL learners in the in-class (n = 11) and online mode (n = 6). The data was collected via open-ended questionnaire and a thematic analysis of the dataset was done to identify patterns of meaning. The results indicate that although the emotions in both modes are similar, and learning English in later life is a source of pride, satisfaction, and self-fulfilment irrespective of the form of classes, the online experience is decidedly more negative and causes greater anxiety, frustration, and boredom. In addition, face-to-face social interaction seems to play a vital role in the learners’ overall perception of the course.