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This article reports on a study that tested Jin and Zhang's Chinese version of the Foreign Language Enjoyment Scale for classroom learning through confirmatory factor analysis and compared the resulting scale with Li, Jiang, and Dewaele's 11-item scale. Four hundred five Chinese first language senior high school students of English in years 1–3 participated in this study. We found that Jin and Zhang's version of the Foreign Language Enjoyment Scale could be reduced to a 16-item scale that preserved the same factor structure as the original scale. This revised 16-item scale showed a more solid dimensional division and better psychometric properties than Li et al.'s scale. We discussed our findings in relation to the scale's wider application for improving foreign language teaching and learning.

The quasi-experimental study reported in this paper investigated whether contracting students' speaking in the foreign language (FL) classroom could effectively mitigate their FL classroom anxiety. It also explored the working mechanisms of this approach to the reduction of classroom anxiety and examined the attitudes FL students had toward it. To these ends, 42 Chinese-as-the-first-language university students learning English as a foreign language (EFL) were recruited and placed into the experimental (n = 20) and comparison groups (n = 22). Both groups were tested for anxiety before and after completing a 1-week contract and a non-contracting treatment, respectively. The experimental group participants' diaries were also collected, and their attitudes toward the intervention were elicited. Results showed that the experimental group's level of anxiety decreased significantly more as compared with that of the comparison group, suggesting the better efficacy of contracting speaking in FL anxiety reduction. Diary analyses also suggested that contracting speaking could increase learners' FL learning engagement; enhance their self-efficacy; facilitate their self-reflection of weaknesses and strengths as an FL learner; cultivate their character strengths and positive emotions; and diminish their fear, nervousness, and worries in class. Furthermore, the experimental group participants generally did not feel uncomfortable with the intervention. These findings were discussed in relation to classroom pedagogy for more effective delivery of FL education.

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The study explores the effects of teacher support and student cohesiveness on foreign language (FL) learning outcomes and compares their effect with that of FL anxiety. One hundred and forty-six first-year Chinese undergraduates of Japanese, who were also learning English, participated in two surveys that were administered over a 2-month interval. Data were collected using the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (Horwitz, Horwitz, & Cope, 1986), the Teacher Support Scale (Trickett & Moos, 2002), the Affiliation Scale (Trickett & Moos, 2002), the English Proficiency Scale, and the Japanese Proficiency Scale. It was found that (a) student cohesiveness was a positive predictor of FL proficiency, (b) teacher support, which was positively related to student cohesiveness and negatively to FL anxiety, did not show a direct relationship with FL proficiency, and (c) FL anxiety, 1 This paper is based on the first author's PhD project.Yinxing Jin, Kees de Bot, Merel Keijzer 106 which was negatively associated with FL proficiency, showed a better predictive power than student cohesiveness and teacher support.