Case Study of EAP Assessments and the Affective Advantages of Student Enjoyment in Hong Kong Higher Education

For higher education, an array of environmental, contextual, and personal challenges have redefined the characteristics of classroom involvement, engagement, and motivation. Notably, motivation concerning ESL leaning/teaching plays a pivotal role (Al-Obaydi & Iddagoda, 2022). Forming the basis for an emotional relationship between student learning and academic performance, these changing conditions are continually shaping the educational experience, and by virtue of pedagogical, classroom, and systemic effectiveness, the performance achievements of the student body. Schillinger et al. (2021), for example, have demonstrated empirically that there is a direct, negative correlation between student anxiety and course performance, with particular vulnerabilities observed in relation to higher-pressure scenarios such as mid-term testing or end-of year examinations. Predicated upon what Goetz et al. (2008) observed as the affective influence of self-conceptualisation on student performance, it is this tension between expected and realised performance outcomes that ultimately predicts the positive or negative influence of student emotions on performance results.

Where students are presented with an array of positive and negative learning experiences, the capacity for self-regulatory behaviour plays a critical role in determining the degree to which student emotions impact (positive or negative) upon academic performance (Pekrun et al., 2011; Trigueros et al., 2020). The array of pressures and challenges encountered by students in Hong Kong’s higher education community over the past two years due to the Covid-19 pandemic, remote learning, and classroom changes has resulted in varying experiences that may have direct implications for academic performance outcomes. Accordingly, the current study has applied a multi-dimensional strategy to capturing and analysing evidence related to the effects of students’ emotional states on academic performance, synthesising end-of-year results from a large scale sample into a representative model of the mediative role of emotional vulnerability and support in higher education classroom settings.