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REVIEW article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Positive Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1545114
Foreign Language Enjoyment in Language Learning From a Positive Psychology Perspective: A Scoping Review
Provisionally accepted- Educational Department, School of Humanities, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Pulau Pinang, Malaysia
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The language learning process is filled with a wide variety of emotions. Given the affective turn to positive emotions in SLA, Foreign Language Enjoyment (FLE) has increasingly gained much scholarly attention in the past decade for its pivotal role in facilitating language learning and improving learners' emotional well-being. However, the previous studies on FLE have been characterized by ontological, epistemological, and methodological orthodoxy in that they suffered from the limitations of looking at FLE from a static, monolithic, and linear perspective. Also, prior FLE studies were mostly conducted without being explicitly situated under positive psychology. In view of these issues, this scoping review aims to provide an innovative review of FLE from the positive psychology (PP) perspective and to offer fresh insights into FLE in SLA. By assessing 36 studies on FLE within PP that highlight the dynamic, interacting, and context-sensitive characteristics of emotions, this article summarizes the research themes and contextual and methodological characteristics and identifies the research gaps. Finally, this review provided some implications and recommendations for future relevant research.
Keywords: Foreign language enjoyment, Positive Psychology, language learning, Second Language Acquisition, Scoping review
Received: 14 Dec 2024; Accepted: 14 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Wu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Wenjie Wu, Educational Department, School of Humanities, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Pulau Pinang, Malaysia
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.