Modeling the association between EFL instructors' foreign language teaching enjoyment and humor styles

Abstract

Background: Positive psychology in the field of applied linguistics has recently shifted its focus from L2 learners to L2 teachers as teachers have been revealed to be a pivotal external affordance for the emergence of learners' positive emotions such as enjoyment. Exploring the link between teacher-related constructs can provide deep insights into L2 teachers' emotional agency within L2 classroom context.Purpose: The current study seeks to examine the association between English as a foreign language (EFL) instructors' enjoyment of foreign language teaching (i.e., personal enjoyment, student appreciation, and social enjoyment) and humor styles (i.e., self-enhancing, affiliative, aggressive, and self-defeating humor styles).Materials and Methods: In order to examine this association, 244 (151 males and 93 females) Turkish EFL instructors voluntarily completed self-report scales measuring their foreign language teaching enjoyment and humor styles.Results: Results of the structural equation modeling (SEM) indicated that higher levels of student appreciation and social enjoyment are correlated with higher levels of affiliative and self enhancing humor. In addition, greater degrees of personal enjoyment, student appreciation, and social enjoyment are correlated with lower levels of aggressive humor, while self-defeating humor was unrelated to any of the enjoyment indices. There was also no significant gender difference for any humor styles.Conclusion: The findings are discussed in view of implications for teacher well-being.