The Impact of Altruistic Teaching on Foreign Language Enjoyment and Speaking Skill: A ‎Positive Psychology Intervention

Ghafouri, Mohammad; Esmaeilee, Soheila

doi:10.22080/iselt.2025.28330.1083

The Impact of Altruistic Teaching on Foreign Language Enjoyment and Speaking Skill: A ‎Positive Psychology Intervention

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

Department of Foreign Language and Literature, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, University of Guilan, Rasht, Guilan, Iran

10.22080/iselt.2025.28330.1083

Abstract

Responding to the paucity of research regarding the role of altruism in L2 education, we operationalized the phenomenon in the L2 context and sought to determine whether teachers' concern about the growth and welfare of the students has any influence on their language learning. In doing so, the effectiveness of a three-staged altruistic teaching intervention was tested on foreign language enjoyment (FLE) and speaking skills of 50 EFL learners, where 25 learners were assigned to the experimental group, and the remaining 25 were involved in the control group and attended the program for ten consecutive weeks. This quantitative study relied on the data obtained from the scores of the groups on the FLE scale and IELTS Speaking Test before and after the intervention. The data was analyzed using Repeated Measures ANOVA, One-Way ANCOVA, and Simple Effect analysis. Results illustrated that altruistic teaching makes language learning more enjoyable. Moreover, the results showed that altruistic teaching not only hones the learners' speaking proficiency but is also beneficial for its retention. Several theoretical and pedagogical implications and directions for future research on positive psychologically-informed interventions are also discussed.

Keywords

Main Subjects

Teacher Education, Identity, and Professional Development in ELT

Copyright © 2025 The Author(s). Published by the Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages at the University of Mazandaran. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license.

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