Ruixia Liu

This paper adopts documentary analysis to retrieve, summarize and analyze 29 foreign language (FL) learners’ flow research in core journals at home and abroad from 2014 to 2024. Three aspects including general publication situation, research design and research focus will be discussed. Then, this paper discusses the limitations and future research directions of flow research. It is found that: (1) the number of empirical studies on flow research at home and abroad has not continued to increase during these ten years. Moreover, there are significant differences in the number of publications at home and abroad. (2) most of the studies examined EFL learners and the participants were mainly from China and Iran.The participants were mainly college students, and few studies explored learners in junior and senior high schools. The research is mainly based on quantitative and mixed research. (3) nearly half of the 29 studies employed various theoretical frameworks, such as Flow Theory and Directed Motivational Currents, while the remaining studies did not clearly specify their theoretical frameworks. The related research mainly focuses four topics: flow experience, the factors affecting flow, the impact of flow on academic achievement and the interaction between different factors and flow. Subsequently, this paper discusses the limitations of current research and looks forward to the future research direction. The author hopes that the research will help deepen new understanding of FL learners’ flow.

FL learners; flow research; research design; methodology; topic

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