Introducing Emotioncy and Exploring its Effect on Flow and Learning Styles of Learners of Persian as a Foreign Language

Since language learners differ in terms of their preferred learning styles (auditory, visual, tactile, kinesthetic, individual, and group), they go through the learning process by relying on a specific sense. Since catering for all learning styles in a class is not feasible, a teacher should adopt a method which is of interest to all learners despite their differences in learning styles. Emotioncy is one of the approaches which attempts to improve learners’ abilities regardless of their learning styles differences through creating excitement for learning and influencing the senses. Emotioncy includes three levels of avolvement (null), exvolvement (auditory, visual, and tactile-kinesthetic), and involvement (intrinsic and comprehensive). The current study aimed to introduce emotioncy and its components (emotion, senses, and frequency) and to explore its effect on Persian language learners’ flow and learning styles. The emotioncy (Pishghadam, 2015), the perceptual learning styles (Reid, 1987), and the flow (Csikzentmihalyi, 1975) questionnaires were used to collect the data. Sixty non-Persian female students who were at the same proficiency level (level 7) and from 16 different nationalities were selected through availability sampling and assigned into four groups. The study treatment drew on emotioncy and consisted of 22 sessions which were implemented during 7 weeks. The results showed that, despite learners’ differences in terms of preferred leaning styles, emotioncy model played a mediating role between the students’ flow and their learning styles, enhanced positive emotions and learning enjoyment, and neutralized the negative effects of perceptual learning styles. Therefore, it is suggested that emotioncy based teaching approaches replace the approaches based on perceptual learning styles.