FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING AND TEACHING ENJOYMENT: TEACHERS' PERSPECTIVES

Aim. The primary objective of the present study was to investigate the level of Foreign Language (FL) learning Enjoyment and Foreign Language (FL) teaching Enjoyment experienced by FL teachers in Poland. The secondary aim was to investigate the sources of enjoyment. Methods. The informants of the study were Polish educators teaching foreign languages at different educational levels. Standard descriptive and inferential statistics were used to report means, median and standard deviation for sociodemographic and baseline characteristics of the sample. The t-Test and one-way ANOVA were used to show mean differences in the score data. Results. The results of the study revealed that teachers experienced a relatively high level of both FL learning Enjoyment and FL teaching Enjoyment, regardless of independent variables (e.g. place of residence, level of education, language being taught). The result revealed a significant gender difference in FL learning Enjoyment in favour of females, while there was no gender difference in FL teaching Enjoyment. A qualitative analysis of participants' emotional experiences in the FL classroom confirmed previous research on FLE to a certain degree. That is, FLE is more related to learner-internal and teacher-specific variables than to the behaviour of peers and the atmosphere in the classroom. Conclusion. The originality of the present study lies in the choice of a mixed-methods approach (qualitative and quantitative data) using a relatively large sample in a field characterised by case studies. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first study on foreign language enjoyment among teachers within the Polish educational context.d