EFL Saudi Students’ Class Emotions and Their Contributions to Their English Achievement at Taif University

Abstract

This paper investigates class academic emotions of anger, anxiety, enjoyment, hope, hopelessness, pride, boredom and shame in the academic situation and their contributions to Saudi EFL students’ English achievement. It also strives to find if there are any differences in class emotions and achievement according gender and streams (science and humanities). The sample consists of 315 (177 males & 138 females) university students. The Pekrun, Goetz, Titz and Perry (2002) class-related emotions scale was used to determine class emotions of students. The findings revealed that there are no differences between science and humanities (M = 22.763, SD = 8.118) in achievement and class emotions except in boredom in favour of science stream. The results also indicated that there were no differences between males and females in class emotions except in the enjoyment in favour of females. It also revealed that there were significant differences between males and females in English achievement in favour of females. On the other hand, it was found that emotions explained 65.8 % in variance of the students’ academic achievement. Furthermore, the findings have implications for students, teachers, and curriculum developers who are to develop a curriculum well-suited with the needs of language learners.