A longitudinal examination of language learners’ group-level enjoyment and emotion regulation in online collaborative learning

This study examines the evolution and regulation of group-level enjoyment of online collaborative language learning. Three Chinese undergraduate learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) collaborated to finish a series of English writing tasks via an online group enabled by WeChat, a popular social instant messaging app in Chinese-speaking communities. The data were collected in three sessions over a single semester using an idiodynamic approach for participants’ ratings of enjoyment intensity and stimulated recall interviews for participants’ descriptions of emotion regulation types. The data were analysed using deductive qualitative thematic analysis and quantitative descriptive analysis. The findings indicate that group-level enjoyment fluctuated within each session of online collaborative learning and tended to last longer in later sessions. Furthermore, the participants reported enacting three different types of regulation – namely self-regulation, co-regulation, and socially shared regulation – to achieve and sustain the dynamic evolution of group-level enjoyment in online collaborative learning. Of these, socially shared regulation was the most prevalent overall, and this increased in prevalence with time. The findings also reveal specific emotion regulation processes within these three types, including planning, evaluating, and the use of emojis. The implications of the findings are discussed, and future research directions are provided.