Motivating students to actively engage in EFL classrooms: Exploring the role of L2 grit and foreign language enjoyment

As self-determination theory (SDT) suggests, students’ motivational and emotional resources play a significant role in improving their classroom engagement. In fact, motivational and emotional resources energize students and direct them toward active involvement in classroom contexts. Considering this, several L2 scholars have inspected the role of motivational and emotional resources in predicting students’ academic engagement. Yet, no investigation to date has simultaneously studied the role of L2 grit and foreign language enjoyment (FLE) in EFL students’ academic engagement. To bridge this gap, this study examined the role of L2 grit and FLE in improving Chinese EFL students’ classroom engagement. In doing this, 564 Chinese EFL learners, selected through available sampling, were invited to complete an online survey containing the scales of the three constructs in question. Structural equation modelling (SEM) was used for data analysis. After confirming the construct validity of the scales by conducting confirmatory factor analysis, SEM results showed that both FLE and L2 grit significantly affected EFL student engagement although the former had a stronger effect in the structural model. Furthermore, it was found that FLE had a small impact on the L2 grit of the participants. The discussion of the findings as well as the implications is finally presented.