Second language class planning: the stages of teaching-learning as a means of promoting the feeling of pleasure

Abstract

The present paper studies how didactic and teaching strategies can promote pleasure in students after a series of class sessions. It focuses on the teaching of English and Spanish as a foreign language in the French university system. The term pleasure is studied as students’ satisfaction regarding the teaching and the strategies planned by the teacher, and not their academic success. Our initial hypothesis is that an in-depth preparation of activities and teaching and didactic resources, in accordance with the stages of learning, helps to promote pleasure in students, regardless of the language or content of the class. Based on a common planning that takes into account the teaching-learning stages (motivation/expectancy, comprehension/attention, generalization/transfer), we carry out a classroom research to corroborate our hypothesis. We selected 180 university students by means of a convenience sampling. A self-administered pencil-and-paper questionnaire was used for data collection, taking into account 6 degrees of satisfaction on a Likert scale.  The questionnaire assessed three aspects: the contents, the teacher's methodology and the students' participation. The quantitative analysis of the data shows that there seems to be a relationship between strict planning and the students' feeling of pleasure during learning.