Modeling the Association between EFL Students’ Boredom and Enjoyment: The Mediating Role of Teacher Humor Style

This study sought to explore the association between English as a foreign language (EFL) students’ foreign language learning boredom (FLB) and foreign language enjoyment (FLE) (i.e., personal enjoyment, teacher appreciation, and social enjoyment) as well as the mediating role of student-perceived teacher humor styles (i.e., affiliative, self-enhancing, aggressive, and self-defeating). In doing so, we firstly investigated the relationship between 229 (67 male and 162 female) Turkish EFL university students’ FLB, FLE, and perceived teacher humor styles. We then probed to determine whether perceived teacher humor styles predict their FLB and FLE. The results indicated that all three indices of FLE had significant negative correlations with FLB. While affiliative and self-enhancing humor styles were significantly and positively correlated with FLE, they were negatively associated with FLB. Aggressive humor had only a significant negative correlation with the teacher appreciation subscale of FLE whereas self-defeating humor indicated a significant positive correlation with FLB. The results also showed that FLE could negatively predict FLB. Finally, the results of the mediation analysis indicated two significant mediation relationships which were significantly related to FLB through affiliative and self-enhancing humor. Implications are discussed in the context of teacher education.