Learner agency and potential for creativity in writing task design and Chinese EFL students’ flow experiences in writing: A contextual perspective

Ensuring learner agency and potential for creativity in task design are likely to elicit different flow experiences among learners, either facilitating or impeding their task engagement and oral or written performance in foreign language learning contexts. However, so far little attention has been paid to the role of these factors in learners’ flow experiences in task-based second language (L2) writing. This study aimed to investigate the relationships between different task conditions operationalized as a teacher-generated content task (TGT), a learner-generated content task (LGT), and a creative task (CT), and learners’ flow experiences by utilizing Czimmermann and Piniel’s adaptation of Egbert’s flow questionnaire. Moreover, the study also examined the possible role that study contexts might play in students’ flow experiences in English writing. Our investigation involved two groups of Chinese learners studying in Hungary and China, 40 students in total, who produced 120 narratives and filled in a flow questionnaire after each completed task. MANOVA results showed a significant main effect for the study context, suggesting that Chinese learners in Hungary experienced more flow in all of the writing tasks while their peers in China experienced more anti-flow on them. Despite the fact that multivariate analyses did not reveal a main effect for task conditions for either flow or anti-flow experiences or an interaction between study contexts and task conditions, findings from univariate follow-up analyses warrant a closer examination of possible task and interaction effects.