High School EFL Students' Pre-Exam Academic Emotions and Their Associations With Academic Achievement: A Latent Profile Analysis

Abstract

Among the previous studies examining academic emotions and academic achievement in EFL contexts, few studies have been conducted on heterogeneous patterns of pre-exam academic emotions among English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) students in high schools. To address this gap, this study aimed to investigate the pre-exam academic emotion profiles and examine their effects on academic achievement. A sample of 391 Chinese high school students completed a questionnaire survey. The latent profile analysis identified three pre-exam academic emotion profiles with unique characteristics: positive-emotion-driven learners (PED Type) (prevalence rate: 31%), bimodal-emotion learners (BE Type) (prevalence rate: 56%) and negative-emotion-driven learners (NED Type) (prevalence rate: 13%). Subsequent analysis revealed significant correlations between the identified emotion profiles and academic achievement. Specifically, the PED Type and BE Type students performed with relative consistency in academic achievement. Meanwhile, both groups reported significantly superior academic achievement compared to the NED Type group. These findings contribute to a deeper understanding of latent patterns of academic emotions in the Chinese EFL settings and offer insightful pedagogical implications for L2 emotion-sensitive interventions.