Foreign Language Anxiety and Enjoyment in an Imagined Community

Abstract

Learning a foreign language can be frustrating for some people and very enjoyable for some others.Emotions are one of the most important factors in the use of English as a foreign language located inthe center of attention of many researchers. One of the emotion-inducing contexts for learning Englishas a foreign language can be the setting of an imagined community. Our focus in this study was on theemergence of emotions, both positive and negative, of three groups of six university students engaged inan English-speaking literature criticism TV program as an imagined community. The programencompassed a specific day to discuss a fiction and a final report of the program specified forpublication in one of the well-established literary bulletins. Each member constructed a specificimagined identity in each group as critics, photographers, reporters, and presenters competing witheach other for the final selection of the best critique and presentation on the discussion day as well asthe publication of the best report. A triangulation of data was gathered including an interview,observation, an open-ended questionnaire as well as personal journals which were qualitativelyanalyzed. The results showed the emergence of enjoyment resulting from the constructed imaginedidentities in the classroom as well as facilitative negative emotions such as anxiety leading to theconsolidation of the participants’ imagined affiliations.© 2018 EJAL & the Authors. Published by Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics (EJAL). This is an open-accessarticle distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY-NC-ND)(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).