Foreign Language Enjoyment (FLE) is the positive emotion learners feel when a language class stretches them and they meet the stretch: the satisfaction of handling a hard task, of a warm exchange with a teacher, of clicking with classmates. Jean-Marc Dewaele and Peter MacIntyre introduced the construct in a 2014 study in Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching, surveying 1,746 foreign-language learners worldwide. Their measure rated 21 items capturing enjoyment in the classroom against an eight-item subset of the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale.
The headline finding reframed how the field thinks about classroom emotion. Enjoyment and anxiety are not opposite ends of a single ruler where more of one means less of the other. They are separate dimensions, only modestly and negatively related, and they coexist: a learner can feel both nervous and thoroughly engaged in the same lesson. Dewaele and MacIntyre's image is that the two emotions are "the right and left feet" of language learning rather than two sides of one coin, a deliberate break from decades of research that treated negative affect, captured by foreign language classroom anxiety, as the whole emotional story.
FLE draws on Barbara Fredrickson's broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. Where fear and anxiety narrow attention to threat, positive emotions widen a person's momentary thought-action repertoire, making a learner more exploratory, more willing to play with the language, more open to risk. Over time these broadened moments build durable personal resources: linguistic confidence, social bonds with classmates, resilience under correction. Enjoyment, on this account, is not a pleasant by-product of learning but part of its engine, feeding the exploratory behaviour that acquisition depends on. The link to Willingness to Communicate is direct, since a learner who is enjoying the class is more inclined to speak up.
In a 2016 follow-up, Dewaele and MacIntyre refined the scale and found it splits into two factors. FLE-Social gathers the interpersonal side: encouraging peers, a likeable teacher, a supportive classroom atmosphere. FLE-Private gathers the inward side, the sense of accomplishment and pride that comes from meeting a difficult challenge. The split matters pedagogically: a teacher can lift social enjoyment by shaping the room's climate and lift private enjoyment by pitching tasks at a productive level of difficulty.
The predictors that surface most consistently are teacher friendliness and predictability, the quality of peer relations, interest in the lesson topic, and a felt sense of progress or accomplishment. A concrete instance: a class where the teacher cracks an occasional joke, sets a task just past the students' current reach, and lets a pair finish it together tends to score high on FLE: the warmth feeds the social factor, the solved challenge feeds the private one.
Shorter instruments followed. Botes and colleagues published a validated nine-item Short Form of the Foreign Language Enjoyment Scale (S-FLES) in 2021, organised under three lower-order factors (teacher appreciation, personal enjoyment, and social enjoyment) beneath FLE as a higher-order construct, making the measure practical for studies that cannot afford a long questionnaire.
The evidence base leans heavily on cross-sectional, self-report convenience samples, often learners recruited online through researchers' own networks, which limits how far findings generalise and invites response biases. Because most designs measure enjoyment and achievement at a single point, the causal direction stays unsettled: enjoyment may drive learning, but doing well may equally produce the enjoyment, and the two plausibly reinforce each other in a loop that snapshot data cannot disentangle. There is also construct-overlap concern, since FLE shares conceptual ground with engagement, interest, and the intrinsic motivation of Self-Determination Theory, raising the question of how much new variance the scale captures rather than relabelling familiar constructs. The independence-from-anxiety claim, while robust, rests on correlations whose size varies across samples, so the precise relationship is better read as context-dependent than fixed.
FLE reframes the affective goal of a lesson from merely lowering anxiety to actively cultivating enjoyment, and the two-factor structure says how. Shaping a warm, predictable, peer-supportive climate targets the social side; setting tasks that are demanding but achievable, and making progress visible, targets the private side. Because enjoyment and anxiety can run high together, a learner showing nerves is not necessarily disengaged, and the practical move is to build positive emotion rather than only to dampen the negative.