Young Learners’ Well-Being and Emotions: Examining Enjoyment and Boredom in the Foreign Language Classroom

Abstract Emotions have received widespread attention in the education field globally thanks to the greater emphasis on well-being in recent times. Against this backdrop and the fact that foreign language (FL) education is increasingly common from a young age, this study set out to investigate what FL classroom activities children find most enjoyable and most boring, and why. Ninety-eight Grade-5 English-as-a-FL learners in Hong Kong participated in this study. The participants put forward 18 activities that they thought were most enjoyable, especially games and videos (together making up about 49% of the responses) . Fifteen activities were deemed most boring, especially writing and dictation (together 45% of the responses). Fun , knowledge-gaining , and opportunities for interaction were among the most common reasons given for activities being enjoyable, while difficult , troublesome , and tiring were the main descriptors of the activities they thought were boring.