ABSTRACT

The study assesses the extent to which Spanish students of English as a foreign language (EFL) at a B1+ level (CEFR) are able to communicate in English (target language) joy, sadness, fear, and anger emotions. It focuses on perception, by investigating learners’ ability to recognise these emotions in a reading task, and production, by examining the linguistic resources used to conceptualise and express them in a written task. The participants, 99 undergraduate students, completed an online English questionnaire, including 20 emotionally-loaded hypothetical situations arousing joy, fear, anger, or sadness, and a reading and a writing task. Emotion perception was analysed in terms of percentage of students’ agreement on identifying the main emotion in each scenario. As to production, emotion words, positive and negative emotion-laden words, expressive interjections, intensifiers, and syntactic devices were analysed to obtain common patterns of emotion conceptualisation and expression in English. The results revealed high percentages in students’ ability to perceive emotions, a bias towards positive scenarios, and different strategies of emotion expression, one of the most common across categories being the preference for the adjectival pattern when describing feelings.

摘要

该研究评估了B1 +等级（CEFR）的西班牙英语作为外语（EFL）的西班牙学生能够以英语（目标语言）交流喜悦，悲伤，恐惧和愤怒情绪的程度。它通过研究学习者在阅读任务中识别这些情绪的能力和生产，通过检查用于概念化和在书面任务中表达它们的语言资源，专注于感知。参加者有99名本科生，完成了在线英语问卷，包括20种令人激动的假想情境，它们引起欢乐，恐惧，愤怒或悲伤，以及阅读和写作任务。根据学生同意确定每种情况下主要情感的百分比，分析了情感感知。在产生方面，分析情感词，带有正负消极情绪的词，表达感叹词，强化词和句法手段，以获得英语中情感概念化和表达的常见模式。结果表明，学生感知情感的能力高，偏向积极情景，以及不同的情感表达策略，其中最常见的类别之一是在描述情感时偏向于形容词模式。