The emergence of boredom in an online language class: An ecological perspective

Emotional-based pedagogy and facilitating EFL learners' perceived flow in online education

“…The findings provided evidence that the learners improved over time as a result of the treatment condition and also that the two treatment conditions engendered differential effects on the learners' improvement in flow, which confirmed Pearce ( 2005 ) claim of the possibility of making e-learning activities motivating and engaging. In line with the L2 literature that pointed to the task type and task engagement as the common boredom-inducing factors in online education (Derakhshan et al, 2021b ; Zawodniak et al, 2021 ; Kruk et al, 2022 ) who suggested adopting educational programs with improved interpersonal relationships and more teacher-student interactions, incorporating the EI intervention with the different topics and activities made language learners more willing to participate. Moreover, according to Csikszentmihalyi ( 1998 ), when individuals participate in an activity for its own sake, i.e., it is so satisfying that they are inclined to repeat it at higher levels of challenge, their perceived flow would increase.…”

“…Considering the context-dependent nature of flow (Ghasemi et al, 2021 ), there is still a need to investigate EFL learners' flow in the transition to online education during the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, the existing body of research suggested the association between emotional intelligence components and flow in various contexts, including the foreign language setting (Dewaele et al, 2022 ), and studies on boredom in online classes during the COVID-19 pandemic pointed to the paramount importance of individuals' emotional experiences in second language context (Wang and Derakhshan, 2021 ; Kruk et al, 2022 ). Nevertheless, the possibility of enhancing EFL learners' experience of flow through EI intervention is unexplored and such relation in an online setting would provide useful insights for the language teachers.…”

“…More recently, Wang and Huang ( 2022 ) developed a 14-item foreign language flow scale in a Chinese context and found that the flow state is composed of three dimensions including enjoyment, boredom, and anxiety. However, the online education, especially during the COVID pandemic, was found to be more accompanied by students' boredom and different variables have been found influential in this regard including the topics assigned, activity types (i.e., repetitiveness and monotony of activities used), excessive teacher control, lack of learner participation, as well as over-challenging tasks (Derakhshan et al, 2021b ; Zawodniak et al, 2021 ; Kruk et al, 2022 ).…”

“…The literature investigating learners' psychological factors during this lockdown has focused on such factors as learners' mental health (Patsali et al, 2020 ; Saha et al, 2020 ; Shigemura et al, 2020 ), learners' attitude (Unger and Meiran, 2020 ), emotion regulation (Restubog et al, 2020 ), boredom (Derakhshan et al, 2021b ; Kruk et al, 2022 ), and anxiety and coping strategies (Hyland et al, 2020 ; Savitsky et al, 2020 ). One of the variables related to anxiety and motivation is flow which has been the focus of few number of studies (Dewaele et al, 2022 ; Wang and Huang, 2022 ) in educational contexts especially during this pandemic.…”

How should teachers tackle students' boredom in the emergency online language class?

“…Consequently, the modes of teaching and learning have been greatly changed, with teachers teaching on this side and students learning on the other side in those most risky places in the world (Luo et al, 2020 ; UNESCO, 2020 ; Chiu Thomas et al, 2021 ; Tsang Jenny et al, 2021 ; Kupers et al, 2022 ). Boredom, a term describing students' learning behaviors, captured the attention of certain Second Language Acquisition researchers under such circumstances (see Derakhshan et al, 2021 , 2022 ; Yazdanmehr et al, 2021 ; Kruk et al, 2022 ; Li, 2022 ), though grassroots teachers might ignore this negative emotion from their students' struggles (Derakhshan et al, 2021 ). As quite a few research studies in the past decade (see Pekrun et al, 2010 ; Chapman, 2013 ; Kruk and Zawodniak, 2018 , 2020 ; Pawlak et al, 2020 , 2022 ; Li, 2021 ) have shown that boredom can hinder learning performance and even result in poorer achievement outcomes, it deserves further investigations and deeper insights into the causal mechanisms of boredom emergence, especially in the terrain of emergency remote language classes in the current situation, which is most probably going to stay for long (Yazdanmehr et al, 2021 ; Derakhshan et al, 2022 ).…”