Modeling the Contribution of Grit,Enjoyment,and Boredom to Predict English as a Foreign Language Students’ Willingness to Communicate in a Blended Learning Environment

Abstract

The complex relationships between emotions experienced by learners and learners’ personality traits, such as grit, that influence students’ willingness to communicate in a second language (L2 WTC) have come under increasing attention. To date, investigators have focused primarily on WTC and the role of emotions in traditional face-to-face settings rather than in blended learning environments. To expand this research, we examined whether grit, foreign language enjoyment (FLE), and foreign language boredom (FLB) among university-level EFL students would be predictive of L2 WTC in a hybrid online and face-to-face learning setting. We studied 345 participants (252 females and 93 males) enrolled in English courses in a blended learning environment from three public universities in Saudi Arabia. We utilized structural equation modeling (SEM) to test a model that combined grit with two emotions (enjoyment and boredom) and L2 WTC. Our results revealed that FLB had the largest relationship to students’ L2 WTC followed by FLE and grit, respectively. In this paper, we discuss these results and present some pedagogical implications of these data for teachers and learners of English as a foreign language (EFL).