Foreign language anxiety and enjoyment concurrently shape pragmatic and grammatical awareness in learners of English as a foreign language—how communicative context modulates their relationship

An intriguing question in research on emotions in L2 learning is whether the effects of positive emotions on L2 outcomes outweigh the influence of negative ones. This study examined how anxiety and enjoyment concurrently shape learners’ pragmatic and grammatical awareness in an EFL context. Participants (N = 119) were university students at B1 level of English proficiency. They completed judgement tests of pragmatic and grammatical awareness and three questionnaires assessing their foreign language classroom anxiety (FLCA), input, processing, and output anxiety (IPOA), and foreign language enjoyment (FLE). The results of correlation and hierarchical regression analyses showed that anxiety and enjoyment significantly and differentially predict young adults’ pragmatic and grammatical awareness. The findings showed that the facilitating effects of enjoyment outweighed anxiety effects in pragmatic awareness tests, but the debilitating influence of anxiety overshadowed enjoyment effects in grammatical awareness tests. Moreover, while enjoyment facilitated learners’ pragmatic awareness in both simple and complex communicative contexts, both types of anxiety (FLCA and IPOA) had debilitating effects on performance in the complex communicative condition that imposed heavier cognitive and linguistic demands on the participants. The findings are discussed in light of the psycholinguistic effects of emotions on cognitive processing in a foreign language.