Achievement emotions and control-value appraisals in foreign language learning

The study intended to describe profiles of three achievement emotions (enjoyment, boredom, anxiety), their associations with each other and with control-value appraisals within the framework of the control-value theory. A total of 2002 Chinese university EFL students from 11 universities in China participated in the questionnaire survey. Descriptive results show that participants perceived learning of English as being controllable to a certain extent, and attached considerable intrinsic and attainment values to learning English. Participants reported experiencing moderate levels of enjoyment and anxiety, and a low level of boredom. Pearson correlation results show that anxiety and boredom were moderately and negatively correlated with enjoyment, being at the same time moderately, positively related to each other. Control appraisal, intrinsic and attainment value appraisals combined in predicting the emotions under investigation, with these effects being strongest in the case of enjoyment. Intrinsic value appraisal played the largest role in predicting enjoyment and boredom. For anxiety, control appraisal showed the largest predictive effect.