Creating happiness in a reading class: A case study

TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC SƯ PHẠM TP HỒ CHÍ MINH 
TẠP CHÍ KHOA HỌC 
HO CHI MINH CITY UNIVERSITY OF EDUCATION
JOURNAL OF SCIENCE
ISSN: 
1859-3100 
KHOA HỌC GIÁO DỤC 
Tập 16, Số 8 (2019): 264-274 
EDUCATION SCIENCE
Vol. 16, No. 7 (2019): 264-274
 Email: tapchikhoahoc@hcmue.edu.vn; Website: 
264 
Research Article 
CREATING HAPPINESS IN A READING CLASS: A CASE STUDY* 
Le Thi Tuyet Minh 
School of Foreign Languages for Economics 
Corresponding author: Le Thi Tuyet Minh – Email: snowle@ueh.edu.vn 
Received: April 8,2019; Revised: June 6, 2019; Accepted: July 7, 2019 
ABSTRACT 
Reading, especially for the English majored bachelors, is usually tiring and boring as 
they have to study long reading texts and long sessions. This research is a case study in which 
the writer attempts to raise students’ learning spirits in reading sessions by carrying out some 
physical activities; collective spirit-raising activities; games which include physical 
movements, PowerPoint and Kahoot; emotion showing actions; funny stories and riddles. The 
paper first presents the research base on learners’ motivation, then analyzes the findings from 
the questionnaire asking students’ opinions on the effectiveness of the activities in promoting 
students’ spirits. Finally, the writer draws up some suggestions for promoting students’ 
learning spirits, including turning tasks into games, letting students show their team spirits and 
solidarity in class, paying attention to students’ feelings, integrating with drawings and visual arts, 
incorporating funny stories and riddles into lessons, breaking lectures into small parts, making 
students stand up and move, or do something different, or give them a short break with some quick 
relaxing activites. These ideas can also be applied broadly in any other classes, not being 
restricted in reading classes. 
Keywords: happiness, reading, motivation, promote spirit, students’ engagement. 
1. Introduction 
In reading classes, the process of reading and answering the comprehension 
questions is rather boring; especially it is tiring for the English majored bachelors who 
have to study long reading sessions. So a question is raised: How to promote students’ 
spirit in reading classes? Abundance of ideas for motivating students have been proposed by 
researchers and educators all over the world, and there has also been a lot of research on the 
effectiveness of different kinds of games on motivating students, but few studies are in rating 
the effectiveness of the spirit-raising activities. In this paper, the writer introduces the 
Cite this article as: Le Thi Tuyet Minh (2019). Creating happiness in a reading class: A case study. Ho Chi 
Minh City University of Education Journal of Science, 16(8), 264-274. 
TẠP CHÍ KHOA HỌC Trường ĐHSP TPHCM Le Thi Tuyet Minh 
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activities she has applied to enhance students’happinessand engagement. The procedures 
include physical exercises, collective spirit-raising activities, games, among which are 
facilitated by PowerPoint and web-based platform Kahoot!, and other activities include 
emotion showing actions, funny stories and riddles.The students are asked to rate their 
favor and the effectiveness of the activities in enhance their spirits. The findingsgive 
some suggestions for teachers’ implementation of the teaching process. 
2. Research base 
Research has yielded insight into the process as well as the practices for effective 
teaching and learning. To engage in learning process, learners must be motivated. To help 
understand motivation in instruction we can look at the ARCS Model of Motivational Design 
as developed by Keller (1983). The ARCS Model identifies four essential components for 
motivation: 
[A]ttention: Learners are more motivated when the instructional design generates 
curiosity and interest about the content or learning context. 
[R]elevance: Learners are more motivated when goals align with their interests. 
[C]onfidence: Learners are more motivated when challenge is balanced. The learning 
process must not be either too easy as to bore the learner, or too difficult such that 
success seems impossible. 
[S]atisfaction: Learners are more motivated when there are rewards for correctly 
executed actions. 
Neuroscience has provided educators and practitioners with practical applications in 
language instructions. Helgesen (2018) with the Science of happiness in ELT maintained: 
“Positive, motivated students – engaged with what they are studying and with each other – 
learn more and approach tasks with more enthusiasm. [] Positive psychology encourages 
‘active constructive’ answers to questions which help people re-experience positivity”. So 
with our goal as language teaching, by focusing on positive emotion, we can encourage and 
engage learners. Helgesen (2015) also stated “emotion shapes learning”, and “using touching 
stories, facilitating self-disclosure, unleashing creativity, organizing non-threatening 
competition, fostering learning through discovery, all work towards this purpose.” He 
reassured that if a task is not emotionally engaging, skip it, and turn it into a game. 
Empirical research demonstrates that learning is improved among happy students. In 
addition, cooperative learning can create positive relationships that increase students’ 
achievement, and promote healthy psychology to learning as in research of Millis&Cottell 
(1997) and Johnson, Johnson, &Smith (1998). 
Also in the light of neuroscience, Sousa (2010) maintained “emotions have a great 
impact on learning” and “movement enhances learning and memory”. Additionally, 
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Hillman, Erickson, & Kramer (2008) conceded “exercise effects on brain and cognition”. 
When we sit for 20 minutes, there’s a built up of blood in the feet, lower legs and buttocks. 
Stand and move for one minute and there is a 15% increase of blood (and therefore oxygen) 
to the brain (Sousa, 2011). As Richland (2014) stated: “Your brain needs to move that body 
in order to be able to stay focused and to learn.” Thus one way to activate students’ brain so 
that it can do its job is to move. 
How can educators apply these ideas in their teaching? 
Helgesen (2018) provided a lot of activities for creating happiness in the classroom. 
Willis (2010) also drew up some strategies for promoting positive feelings including: 
 Allowing students to move around in class periodically in learning activities. Examples 
are using pantomime while they guess which vocabulary word is being enacted or 
doing a ball toss. 
 Shared reading by students pairs. 
 Creating opportunities for students to experience intrinsic satisfaction from 
incremental progress, not just feedback after final product assessment. 
 Using humor, not sarcasm 
 Structuring positive peer interactions 
 Using well-planned collaborative group work 
3. Classroom setting, Rationale & Objectives 
3.1 Classroom setting 
The undergraduate program for students majoring in Business English at UEH has 6 
modules for developing students’ four skills. The second-year students in this study are in 
the module 3 reading class, so the students are at upperintermediate level. The course book 
is Advanced Market Leader, 3rd edition by Iwonna Dubicka & Margaret O’Keeffe, Pearson 
Longman publisher. The course includes six weeks with twelve reading passages related to 
business topics. There are 35 students in class. They have one class meeting each week, 
which lasts for five periods (each period is 50 minutes). 
3.2. Rationale & objectives 
The five-period sections of the reading course are quite long and tiring for the students 
with the process of reading and answering the comprehension questions. The students need 
some breaking activities. Therefore, the instructor implements a lot of fun and relaxing 
activities with the purpose of promoting students’ spirit in order to facilitate the learning 
process. 
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267 
4. The process of the research 
Teachers around the world have implemented different kinds of games and have done 
a lot of research on the effectiveness of games on students’ achievements. However, the 
writer finds that games are not enough to promote students’ spirits during her reading 
sessions which may last up to four hours long. In the light of the applications in 
neuroscience, the theoretical background presented above and her own experience, the writer 
exploited these following activities in her class with an attempt to generate movements and 
create positive emotions for the students. 
5-minute physical tasks. The teacher executed some physical exercises with students 
like stretching, bending, etc. 
Peer neck massage. Students formed two separate lines; they put their hands on the 
neck/ shoulders of the person in front of them. They massaged the person. After a minute or 
so, they turned around and massaged the other person. 
 Ball/ stuffed animal toss. The teacher tossed a soft ball or a stuffed animal to a student. 
The student who caught the ball or who the ball hit would answer the question. Then that 
student would continue to toss the ball to other students. 
Hugging.Students would find the partners who they like and give them a hug. First 
they did in pairs, then in groups of three or four or five. 
Drawing your emotional faces. The teacher showed Andrews and Withey’s faces 
measure, shown in Figure 1 below and asked students to draw their face to show their 
feelings. The teacher also encouraged students to be more creative in drawing their faces. 
Figure 1. Faces and feelings (Andrews and Withey, 1976 as cited in Argyle, 2013) 
Showing emotion with hand gestures. Students would show their feelings simply by 
hand gestures like raising their thumbs up/ down or horizontally. The teacher also 
encouraged students to be more creative with their hand gestures. 
Playing games. There were a variety of games that the teacher utilized in her class: 
games with PowerPoint, games with Kahoot!, and games integrated with physical 
movements such as Snap It (This is a vocabulary review game in which the students work 
in groups. The teacher reads the definition of the words; those who see the word snap it 
quickly and keep it. At the end of the game, who has the most words is the winner), Slap it 
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(This is also a vocabulary review game. The teacher writes the words on the board. The 
students, in two groups, stand in two lines. Each time, one student from each group will run 
to the board to slap the word as the teacher reads the definition of the word. The one who 
slaps the word first is the winner and wins one point for their group.), Running answer (in 
which the students, in two teams, in turns, run to the board to write down the answers, which 
team finishes first and has more correct answers is the winner), or Rock- paper-scissors (in 
which the students compete for the right to answer the questions). 
Showing your team spirit. The teacher asked the students to show their team spirit. The 
teacher gave some suggestions such as creating a chant/ slogan for the team, slapping hands 
together, etc. and encouraged the students to be more creative. 
Funny stories with blanks. The students, in pairs, read some funny stories and filled in 
the blanks. 
Riddles.The students worked in groups to find out the answers for the riddles. 
After 6 weeks, the writer carried out a survey to ask for the students’ reflections on the 
effect of the activities by delivering the questionnaire in Table 1 below. The respondents 
were 35 second-year English-majored students. They were asked to rate the degree to which 
they like the activities and the level of effectiveness of the activities in enhancing their spirit 
to study. The research questions utilized the Likert scale. 
Table 1. The questionnaire 
Dear my beloved students, 
In order to improve my teaching, I’d like you to rate the activities that we have done in class. 
Please tick () into your corresponding choices. 
1. How do you like these activities? 
Activities 
Dislike 
very 
much 
Dislike Neutral Like 
Like 
very 
much 
1. Games with PowerPoint 
2. Games with physical movements 
3. Games with Kahoot! 
4. Peer massage activity 
5. 5-minute physical task 
6. Hugging activity 
7. Ball toss activity 
8. Showing emotion with hand gestures 
9. Drawing your emotional faces 
10. Team spirit showing activity 
TẠP CHÍ KHOA HỌC Trường ĐHSP TPHCM Le Thi Tuyet Minh 
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11. Funny stories with blanks 
12. Riddles 
Can you tell me why you like or don’t like these activities?/ Any other ideas: 
................................................................................................................................................... 
.. 
2. How effective are these activities in promoting your spirits? 
Activities 
Very in-
effective 
Not 
effective 
Neutral Effective 
Very 
effective 
1. Games with PowerPoint 
2. Games with physical movements 
3. Games with Kahoot! 
4. Peer massage activity 
5. 5-minute physical task 
6. Hugging activity 
7. Ball toss activity 
8. Showing emotion with hand 
gestures 
9. Drawing your emotional faces 
10. Team spirit showing activity 
11. Funny stories with blanks 
12. Riddles 
Can you tell me why?/ Any other ideas: ................................................................................... 
.. 
.. 
5. Findings 
With regard to the students’ preference, their responses are shown in Table 2. 
Table 2. The students’ preference of the activities 
Activities 
Dislike 
very 
much 
Dislike Neutral Like 
Like 
very 
much 
N 
1. Games with 
PowerPoint 
0 1 8 18 8 35 
 3% 23% 51 % 23% 
2. Games with physical 
movements 
1 2 11 16 5 35 
3% 6% 31% 46% 14% 
3. Games with Kahoot! 
0 1 14 11 9 35 
 3% 40% 31% 26% 
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4. Peer massage activity 
1 5 16 9 4 35 
3% 14% 46% 26% 11% 
5. 5-minute physical task 
0 4 19 10 2 35 
 11% 54% 29% 6% 
6. Hugging activity 
3 6 14 8 4 35 
9% 17% 40% 23% 11% 
7. Ball toss activity 
1 3 8 15 4 31 
3% 9% 26% 49% 13% 
8. Showing emotion with 
hand gestures 
0 4 12 13 4 33 
 12% 36% 40% 12% 
9. Drawing your 
emotional faces 
0 4 9 8 14 35 
 11% 26% 23% 40% 
10. Team spirit showing 
activity 
0 0 5 15 15 35 
 14% 43% 43% 
11. Funny stories with 
blanks 
0 0 7 17 7 31 
 23% 54% 23% 
12. Riddles 
0 0 6 14 8 28 
 21% 50% 29% 
Some of the students did not rate some activities, so the numbers of responses for some 
activities were a little different from the others. 
The results showed that most of the students liked the activities carried out. Very few 
students had negative feelings. 
To the writer’s surprise, the activity that the students enjoyed the most is Team spirit 
showing activity (86%). Games with PowerPoint followed with 74%. Team spirit showing 
activity also had the highest number of strong likes with 43%, and surprisingly Drawing 
your emotionalfaces activity got the second highest of strong likes. The students’ next 
favored activities included Funny stories, Riddles, Drawing your emotional faces, Games 
with physical movements, Games with Kahoot!. So the students showed a strong preference 
for games, in all kinds. 
As for physical activities involving 5-minute physical task, Peer massage activity, 
Hugging activity, Showing emotion with hand gestures, and Ball toss activity, although many 
students expressed their interest, there were a considerable number of students who had 
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neutral idea, and they stated more dislike than for other activities. The two activities that got 
the most dislike were Hugging (26%) and Peer massage (17%). 
With regard to the students’ rating of the effectiveness of the activities, their responses 
are shown in Table 3. 
Table 3. Rating the effectiveness of the activities 
Activities 
Very in-
effective 
Not 
effective 
Neutral Effective 
Very 
effective 
N 
1. Games with 
PowerPoint 
0 0 3 21 11 35 
 9% 60% 31% 
2. Games with physical 
movements 
0 1 3 20 11 35 
 3% 9% 57% 31% 
3. Games with Kahoot! 
0 1 10 11 11 33 
 3% 31% 33% 33% 
4. Peer massage activity 
1 2 16 12 4 35 
3% 6% 45% 34% 12% 
5. 5-minute physical task 
0 3 17 11 4 35 
 9% 48% 31% 12% 
6. Hugging activity 
1 6 12 11 5 35 
3% 17% 34% 32% 14% 
7. Ball toss activity 
0 1 13 15 6 35 
 3% 37% 43% 17% 
8. Showing emotion with 
hand gestures 
1 4 11 15 2 33 
3% 12% 34% 45% 6% 
9. Drawing your 
emotional faces 
0 5 6 10 14 35 
 14% 17% 29% 40% 
10. Team spirit showing 
activity 
0 2 3 13 17 35 
 6% 9% 37% 48% 
11. Funny stories with 
blanks 
0 0 8 12 11 31 
 26% 39% 35% 
12. Riddles 
0 0 5 13 11 29 
 17% 45% 38% 
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272 
Most of the students thought these activities were effective though a rather large 
number of the students had neutral idea for the effectiveness of some activities like 5-minute 
physical task, Peer massage activity, Ball toss activity, Hugging activity, Showing emotion 
with hand gestures. 
In correspondence with the students’ likes, Team spirit showing activity and Drawing 
your emotional faces activity maintained the highest positions in rating with strong 
effectiveness. The three kinds of games were also rated among the highest level of 
effectiveness. Understandably, the activities that they didn’t like were not considered as 
effective as the others. However, more students thought Hugging activity were effective than 
they liked it. 
6. Suggestions and discussion 
From the findings of the research, the writer has proposed some suggestions for 
motivational instructions. 
Students love games, in all kinds, so teachers should involve a lot of games and 
competition in their activities. Turn tasks into games. 
The fact that Team spirit showing activity had the highest number of the strong likes 
suggests implications that teachers need to let students show their team spirits and solidarity 
in class. 
Students enjoy Drawing your emotional faces activity, and they drew some very funny 
and creative pictures, so teachers need to pay attention to students’ feelings and integrate 
with drawings and visual arts. 
Funny stories and riddles should also be well incorporated into lessons as students are 
keen on them. 
Some students dislike Hugging and Peer massage due to the sensitive reason; 
therefore, teachers should only employ these two activities occasionally. 
In addition, teachers should break lectures into small parts. Students get bored, tired 
and they can’t stay focused with long lessons. Teachers should change type/ way of 
activities, diversify the activities by integrating four skills. As frequently as possible, 
teachers should make students stand up and move, or do something different, or give them a 
short break with the activities like 5-minute physical tasks, peer neck massage, hugging, 
drawing emotional faces, or simply showing emotion with hand gestures. A quick relaxing 
activity is really helpful in releasing melatonin and will energize students to work more 
effectively. 
Make students talk, exploiting peer and group work. 
The motivational activities implemented in this research can be applied in classes for 
all four skills, not being restricted in the reading class. These activities were carried out 
smoothly thanks to the students’ enthusiasm, and the number of the students in class (N=35) 
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was rather