Does the effect of enjoyment outweigh that of anxiety in foreign language performance?

Picture yourself back in a language class. You know the feeling: some days you're leaning in, laughing with classmates, and words come a little more easily. Other days, your heart thumps before you even open your mouth. Those two currents—enjoyment and anxiety—aren't just moods. In language learning, they show up as two well-studied constructs. Foreign language classroom anxiety is that situation-specific knot of worry and self-doubt that flares in class. Foreign language enjoyment is its sunnier cousin: a sense of pleasure with the material, the people, and the teacher, often with both a social side—feeling supported by peers—and a private side—savoring your own progress. For years, researchers like Elaine Horwitz and Peter MacIntyre focused on the drag that anxiety puts on performance. Then positive psychology reframed the conversation. As Judith Schutz and Reinhard Pekrun argued, engagement and meaning matter just as much. Jean-Marc Dewaele and collaborators pushed the point further: enjoyment isn't just the absence of anxiety. The two can sit side by side, and both shape how well you learn. So here's the wager behind the study we're discussing: when you put enjoyment and anxiety in the same ring, which one better predicts how you actually do in a language? Dewaele and Ghada Alfawzan wanted a clean test. Not one study on negatives, a separate one on positives, and a hand-wavy comparison across papers. They built a side-by-side design in two very different contexts—a pair of selective London secondary schools and Saudi universities—so we could see whether the emotional patterns travel across age, culture, and assessment type. Let's start in London. Study 1 brought in one hundred eighty-nine pupils, ages 12 to 18, and asked them to report on their emotions and their most recent foreign language test score. Enjoyment was measured with a ten-item scale that distinguishes those social and private flavors. Anxiety came from an eight-item subset of the classic Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale that Horwitz and colleagues popularized, with the usual trick of reverse-coding calm items so higher numbers mean more worry. Both instruments used a simple five-point agree-to-disagree format and showed solid reliability; they're the kind of scales you can trust to capture what they claim to capture. Performance was the pragmatic yardstick: how did you do on your last big language test? Scores ran the gamut, from just under half marks to perfect one hundred scores, and the average hovered near the high end at eighty-seven point seven percent. Statisticians will appreciate one wrinkle: those scores weren't normally distributed. Instead of shoehorning them into a straight-line model that would complain about that, the team used Spearman correlations, a non-parametric way to ask, "As one thing goes up, does the other tend to go up or down?" Here's the heartbeat of the London result. More enjoyment leads to better performance. More anxiety leads to worse performance. And when you stack the two side by side, the enjoyment-performance link is a bit stronger than the anxiety-performance link. We're not talking huge effects—Dewaele and Alfawzan call them small to medium—but they're dependable, and they move in the directions you'd expect. That little asymmetry in favor of enjoyment is the interesting part. It suggests that feeling good in class may do slightly more for your test score than feeling nervous does against it. Take a breath with that. It doesn't mean anxiety is harmless—far from it. It means that cultivating what's enjoyable might pay off at least as much as trying to stamp out every fear. Now to Saudi Arabia. Study 2 shifted the lens to adult learners and switched the performance measure to something objective and portable: LexTALE, a sixty-item test of lexical knowledge where you decide which strings are real English words. One hundred fifty-two participants took part, spanning 18 to 40 years old, many with recent university experience, some using English regularly in daily life, others only occasionally. They completed the same enjoyment and anxiety scales as the London pupils, and those scales performed beautifully here too, with high internal consistency in this new context. How did this group fare on the proficiency side? The average LexTALE score landed at fifty-seven point four, which, using the categories that Mirjam Lemhöfer and Mirjam Broersma proposed, sits in the lower-intermediate band. You don't need to memorize the cutoffs to follow the story. The key is that this test gives us a clean, continuous read on how much English vocabulary people reliably recognize. As in London, the distribution wasn't bump-on-a-bell normal, so the team again reached for non-parametric analyses. And the pattern repeated with a twist. Enjoyment correlated strongly and positively with proficiency. Anxiety nudged the other way—higher worry linked to slightly lower scores—but the negative association was only marginal. In plain terms, feeling good about English tracked reliably with knowing more words, while feeling anxious chipped away at scores a bit, but not as sharply. That convergence across countries and ages is the headline. In two very different classrooms, positive emotion showed up as at least as potent a companion to performance as negative emotion was a drag. Numbers tell one kind of story; voices tell another. The Saudi study added short, open-ended responses about moments that made English enjoyable or anxious. Again and again, students pointed to the teacher. When the person at the front of the room was engaged, humane, and organized—someone who turned presentations into a chance to shine rather than a public shaming—enjoyment rose and anxiety softened over time. When public speaking was thrown at low-proficiency students without support, the fear spiked. Some accounts were hard to hear: ridicule for misspelling, belittling comments, even reports of physical punishment. Under that climate, several said they considered quitting. Others described themselves as "fighters"—they kept going, learned to manage the worry, and found islands of enjoyment that pulled them through. These vignettes aren't numeric proof of causality, but they put flesh on the correlations. Classroom climate isn't a nice-to-have; it's the air students breathe. Step back and put the two contexts side by side. In London, enjoyment and anxiety each tracked test performance, with enjoyment pulling a little harder in the positive direction. In Saudi Arabia, enjoyment again linked clearly to better proficiency, while anxiety's tie to lower scores was there but weaker. Across both, effects were small to medium. That's exactly what Dewaele and Alfawzan emphasized: in the tug-of-war between positive and negative affect, the rope moves more with enjoyment than with anxiety, and it does so in different age groups, with different assessments, and in different educational systems. A word about method, because it matters for how we interpret all this. Both studies are correlational snapshots. They capture associations—how variables travel together—not causes. The London test scores were self-reported, though they came from formal school assessments. The Saudi sample was recruited online through social platforms, which is efficient but can invite self-selection; you might get more people who already care about English. In London, there was a clear ethics process: parental notification with opt-out and student consent, overseen by a university ethics committee. These are well-run studies, but they can't tell us whether boosting enjoyment would necessarily raise scores, or whether students who do well simply feel better about class. Why might enjoyment matter so consistently? Positive psychology offers one plausible mechanism. As Pekrun and others have argued, positive emotions tend to broaden our attentional scope and encourage approach behaviors. In a language classroom, that could mean more willingness to speak up, play with new structures, and persist through mistakes. Anxiety, by contrast, narrows attention and promotes avoidance—you focus on the error you just made and stop taking risks. What Dewaele and MacIntyre showed in earlier work is that these aren't a single dial. You can be both excited to learn and anxious about performing. The current studies suggest that when both are present, the buoyancy from enjoyment can have a slightly stronger lift on performance than the drag from anxiety has in pulling it down. If you're a teacher listening to this, the practical takeaway isn't to paste on a smile and ignore fear. It's to design for enjoyment with the same seriousness we bring to error correction. That might look like building early wins into speaking activities, so beginners taste success before they face a high-stakes presentation. It might mean explicit norms around respect, so mistakes are framed as data for learning rather than as a personal failing. And it almost certainly means attending to your own emotional presence in the room—the thing students kept highlighting. The Saudi comments made it stark: affirming, well-prepared teaching lifted both mood and outcomes; harshness curdled the air and pushed some to the exit. There's also a measurement lesson tucked in here. The team didn't rely on one kind of performance metric. In the United Kingdom, it was the last big test—what schools actually use. In Saudi Arabia, it was LexTALE, a standardized vocabulary measure. The emotions-performance links held under both. They also held with slightly different instruments and populations. That kind of triangulation is what lends weight to the claim of generality, even if we'll need more contexts to be fully confident. Limitations are real and not just footnotes. Convenience samples—and these were—can skew toward high achievers, especially in elite schools or among volunteers who already like English. The qualitative pieces add color but can't be generalized on their own. And because the data are cross-sectional, we can't rule out reverse causation: maybe better performance gives rise to more enjoyment. Dewaele and Alfawzan are clear about this. They're mapping the landscape, not claiming to have reengineered it. So where does that leave us? With a simple, sturdy message that travels well: in foreign language learning, enjoyment isn't fluff. It's a measurable, reliable companion of better performance, often more robust than the corrosive pull of anxiety. That doesn't erase the need to address fear. It suggests a two-pronged strategy—reduce needless anxiety where we can and actively cultivate the conditions that let enjoyment grow. If you're thinking about next steps, think longitudinal and experimental. Follow students over time to see whether changes in enjoyment predict later gains, beyond where they started. Try classroom interventions—teacher training that targets supportive feedback and structured peer work that strengthens the social side of enjoyment—and see if that nudges both mood and scores. And sharpen the lens on specificity. As Dewaele has urged elsewhere, ask whether the enjoyment-anxiety balance looks the same in French versus English versus Mandarin, or in writing versus speaking. The big-picture pattern is here. The nuance is where practice lives. For now, the through-line is clear. Whether you're a teenager in a London classroom or an adult in a Saudi university, how you feel about the language, your peers, and your teacher shows up in how you perform. Enjoyment and anxiety can sit in the same seat. But if you're betting on which one will move the needle more, this evidence says: put a little extra weight on joy.