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The stone left unturned: boredom among young EFL learners

  • Vahid Mahmoudi-Gahrouei , Mariusz Kruk , Fatemeh Moafian EMAIL logo and Maryam Farahmand Boroujeni
Published/Copyright: April 26, 2024
International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching
From the journal International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching Volume 63 Issue 4

Abstract

The present study explores the under-researched phenomenon of boredom, its antecedents, and solutions, as well as the boredom-generating parts of English classes among 227 young learners of English in an Iranian context. Data were collected through an open-ended questionnaire, and semi-structured interviews were thematically analyzed using MAXQDA (Version 2022) to extract themes concerning the issues under study. Findings revealed that teachers’ lack of control over students’ behavior, lack of classroom management, lack of fun in teaching, excessive repetitions, teacher-centered teaching, and classroom physical environment were the main causes of boredom. As for solutions to learners’ boredom, introducing better classroom management strategies, making the class more effervescent, making teaching more learner-centered, and enhancing classroom physical environment were suggested. The findings also revealed that the middle of the English class was the most boredom-generating part for the young learners of English.

Keywords: boredom; young EFL learners; individual learner differences; L2 classroom; English learning
Corresponding author: Fatemeh Moafian, Department of English Language and Literature, Kosar University of Bojnord, Bojnord, Iran, E-mail:

  1. Ethical approval: Ethical considerations have been met.

  2. Consent to participate: All the students have consented to participate in the study by signing a written consent form.

  3. Consent for publication: All the authors have consented to publish the paper in the IRAL.

  4. Competing interests: The authors declare no conflicts of interest for the present paper.

  5. Research funding: The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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Supplementary Material

This article contains supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/iral-2023-0180).

Received: 2023-08-04
Accepted: 2024-03-26
Published Online: 2024-04-26
Published in Print: 2025-11-25

© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Research Articles
  3. Learning academic vocabulary through reading online news
  4. A Q methodological study into pre-service Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) teachers’ mindsets about teaching competencies
  5. Assessing written production in L2 Mandarin Chinese: fluency and accuracy
  6. Machine translation as a form of feedback on L2 writing
  7. Acquisition of collocations under different glossing modalities and the mediating role of learners’ perceptual learning style
  8. Unpacking changing emotions in multiple contexts: idiodynamic study of college students’ academic emotions
  9. Exploring L2 learners’ processing of unknown words during subtitled viewing through self-reports
  10. Model text as corrective feedback in L2 writing: the role of working memory and vocabulary size
  11. Exploring learner-related variables in child collaborative writing: interaction mindset, willingness to communicate and proficiency
  12. Contributions of significant others to second language teacher well-being: a self-determination theory perspective
  13. The stone left unturned: boredom among young EFL learners
  14. The impact of out-of-school L2 input and interaction on adolescent classroom immersion and community-L2 learners’ L2 vocabulary: opportunities for interaction are key
  15. Promoting interaction and lowering speaking anxiety in an EMI course: a group dynamic assessment approach
  16. Relationship between learner creativity, task planning, and speaking performance in L2 narrative tasks
  17. Influencing factors of L2 writers’ engagement in an assessment as learning-focused context
  18. The cognitive-emotional dialectics in second language development: speech and co-speech gestures of Chinese learners of English
  19. Impact of task type and task complexity on negotiation of meaning in young learners of Chinese as a second language
  20. Effects of working memory and task type on syntactic complexity in EFL learners’ writing
  21. Assessing effects of source text complexity on L2 learners’ interpreting performance: a dependency-based approach
  22. Incidental learning of collocations through reading an academic text
  23. Listenership always matters: active listening ability in L2 business English paired speaking tasks
  24. Enhancing the processing advantage: two psycholinguistic investigations of formulaic expressions in Chinese as a second language
  25. The effect of form presentation mode and language learning aptitude on the learning burden and decay of L2 vocabulary knowledge
  26. Examining the impact of foreign language anxiety and language contact on oral proficiency: a study of Chinese as a second language learners
  27. The dynamics of changes in linguistic complexity and writing scores in timed argumentative writing among beginning-level EFL learners
  28. Perception of English semivowels by Japanese-speaking learners of English
  29. Corrigendum
  30. Corrigendum to: Development and validation of Questionnaire for Self-regulated Learning Writing Strategies (QSRLWS) for EFL learners
https://doi.org/10.1515/iral-2023-0180
Keywords for this article
boredom; young EFL learners; individual learner differences; L2 classroom; English learning

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Research Articles
  3. Learning academic vocabulary through reading online news
  4. A Q methodological study into pre-service Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) teachers’ mindsets about teaching competencies
  5. Assessing written production in L2 Mandarin Chinese: fluency and accuracy
  6. Machine translation as a form of feedback on L2 writing
  7. Acquisition of collocations under different glossing modalities and the mediating role of learners’ perceptual learning style
  8. Unpacking changing emotions in multiple contexts: idiodynamic study of college students’ academic emotions
  9. Exploring L2 learners’ processing of unknown words during subtitled viewing through self-reports
  10. Model text as corrective feedback in L2 writing: the role of working memory and vocabulary size
  11. Exploring learner-related variables in child collaborative writing: interaction mindset, willingness to communicate and proficiency
  12. Contributions of significant others to second language teacher well-being: a self-determination theory perspective
  13. The stone left unturned: boredom among young EFL learners
  14. The impact of out-of-school L2 input and interaction on adolescent classroom immersion and community-L2 learners’ L2 vocabulary: opportunities for interaction are key
  15. Promoting interaction and lowering speaking anxiety in an EMI course: a group dynamic assessment approach
  16. Relationship between learner creativity, task planning, and speaking performance in L2 narrative tasks
  17. Influencing factors of L2 writers’ engagement in an assessment as learning-focused context
  18. The cognitive-emotional dialectics in second language development: speech and co-speech gestures of Chinese learners of English
  19. Impact of task type and task complexity on negotiation of meaning in young learners of Chinese as a second language
  20. Effects of working memory and task type on syntactic complexity in EFL learners’ writing
  21. Assessing effects of source text complexity on L2 learners’ interpreting performance: a dependency-based approach
  22. Incidental learning of collocations through reading an academic text
  23. Listenership always matters: active listening ability in L2 business English paired speaking tasks
  24. Enhancing the processing advantage: two psycholinguistic investigations of formulaic expressions in Chinese as a second language
  25. The effect of form presentation mode and language learning aptitude on the learning burden and decay of L2 vocabulary knowledge
  26. Examining the impact of foreign language anxiety and language contact on oral proficiency: a study of Chinese as a second language learners
  27. The dynamics of changes in linguistic complexity and writing scores in timed argumentative writing among beginning-level EFL learners
  28. Perception of English semivowels by Japanese-speaking learners of English
  29. Corrigendum
  30. Corrigendum to: Development and validation of Questionnaire for Self-regulated Learning Writing Strategies (QSRLWS) for EFL learners
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