A Study On The Changes Of First-Year English Majors’ Academic Emotions From The Perspective Of The Social Network

Individual students are in a particular social relationship structure,and the interaction between learners is the basis of the changes in emotions.Therefore,contextualized analysis no longer focuses on individual learners but on the operational system.However,few studies have combined collaborative networks of group learning with academic emotions in English teaching,which are mainly descriptive statistics of network structure characteristics of learning groups and differential analysis of societal interaction characteristics.Therefore,in-depth research on the association between social network structure and academic emotions is necessary.Questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were used as the primary research instruments in this study.It explored the changes in the social network structure and the academic emotions in the first semester and their relationship between them through a mixed research path.This study aims at answering the following two research questions:(1)How do first-year English majors’ social network structures and academic emotions change in a semester?(2)Do first-year English majors’ social network structures affect their academic emotions?If so,how do social network structures affect academic emotions?This study yielded the following research findings:First,first-year English majors’ social network structure and academic emotions changed to different degrees in one semester:The level of enjoyment increased slightly overall,and the level of boredom tended to decrease significantly.The social network’s density,the network’s centrality,and the number of cliques also increased significantly.Secondly,some characteristics of the social network structure had a different correlation with the academic emotions of first-year English majors.Among them,social network density had no significant correlation with academic emotions;social network centrality and the number of cliques had a significantly positive correlation with enjoyment and a negative correlation with boredom.Thirdly,the social network centrality positively impacted enjoyment and a negative impact on boredom.The influence mechanism of social network centrality on the two academic emotions can be summarized as follows:The improvement of social network centrality increased the emotional collision between students,which increased the activity of emotions.Therefore,students’ enjoyment increased while their boredom was reduced.Surprisingly,although there was a significant correlation between the number of cliques and the two emotions,the regression analysis showed that the variable did not affect the changes in the two academic emotions.To some extent,this study reflects that the social network structure is one factor affecting the academic emotions of first-year English majors.In addition,this study helps explore the internal structure of academic emotions and other characteristics of social network structures,enriches the empirical research on academic emotions,and verifies the applicability of Social Network Analysis in emotional research.At the theoretical level,this study enriches the theoretical system and research methods of students’ social network structure.It expands the research perspective on the influencing factors of students’ academic emotions.It provides new theoretical support and research methods for future foreign language teaching research.At the practical level,this study has practical significance for improving foreign language teachers’ understanding of the importance of academic emotions of first-year English majors and guiding students to adapt to the new environment to regulate academic emotions quickly.