A study of the impacts of motivational regulation and self-regulated second-language writing strategies on college students' proximal and distal writing enjoyment and anxiety.

Motivational regulation is crucial to explaining autonomous self-regulated learning, yet has received relatively little empirical attention. This study therefore examined how 230 college students' motivational-regulation strategies affected their proximal and distal second-language writing-achievement emotions (i.e., enjoyment and anxiety), and sought evidence of interactive effects of such strategies and self-regulated learning strategies on each of these two types of emotions. All the studied types of motivational-regulation strategy were found to directly predict both proximal and distal writing enjoyment, under a "the more the happier" principle, but only a performance-oriented motivational regulation strategy predicted proximal or distal writing anxiety. A social-behavior learning strategy was found to counteract the high proximal anxiety caused by heavy use of the performance self-talk motivational regulation strategy; and motivational-regulation predictors also emerged as stable predictors of both proximal and distal writing well-being. These findings are expected to be both theoretically valuable to the study of motivational regulation under the self-regulated learning framework, and of practical value to educators, learners, and curriculum designers.

The Relationship Between Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety, Enjoyment, and Expectancy-Value Motivation and Their Predictive Effects on Chinese High School Students' Self-Rated Foreign Language Proficiency.

The present study explored the relations among foreign language (FL) classroom anxiety, enjoyment, expectancy-value motivation, and their predictive effects on Chinese high school students' self-rated FL proficiency. Participants were 280 senior high school Chinese English as a foreign language learners who were surveyed on their foreign language classroom anxiety (FLCA), foreign language enjoyment (FLE), and expectancy-value motivation. Results showed that (1) the students generally experienced a medium to a high level of FL classroom emotions with FLE slightly higher than FLCA. They were more value-motivated than expectancy-motivated toward FL learning. Most of them perceived their FL proficiency as unsatisfying; (2) the students' FLE was significantly positively correlated with all dimensions of expectancy-value motivation, while their FLCA and expectancy-value motivation demonstrated a complex correlation pattern. As the students' FLCA level increased, their expectancy beliefs, intrinsic value, attainment value, and utility value decreased, but their cost value increased. By contrast, as their FLE level increased, their expectancy beliefs, intrinsic value, attainment value, utility value all increased, while their cost value first increased and then slightly decreased; and (3) expectancy beliefs, intrinsic value, private enjoyment in FL learning and anxiety arising from fear of negative evaluation jointly significantly predicted the students' self-rated FL proficiency. Implications for future research and teaching were also discussed.