Event Details

Special department talk by Jean-Marc Dewaele (Birkbeck, University of London) on "Crucial role of learner emotions in the foreign language class". Hosted by the Department of Linguistics and English Language.

Crucial role of learner emotions in the foreign language class

Abstract: I will talk about an emerging area of research in the field of foreign language learning, which was triggered by the introduction of Positive Psychology (Dewaele et al., 2019). It has focused on the role of emotions in foreign language learning and their effect on performance, beyond the traditional focus on foreign language anxiety and includes new concepts such as Foreign Language Enjoyment, Peace of Mind and flow (Botes et al., 2022; Dewaele & MacIntyre, 2014; Zhou et al., 2021). Recent studies showed that teacher behaviour in the FL class shape learners’ enjoyment, anxiety and motivation (Dewaele, Saito & Halimi, 2022, 2023).

JEAN-MARC DEWAELE is Professor of Applied Linguistics and Multilingualism at Birkbeck, University of London. He has published widely on individual differences in psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, pragmatic, psychological and emotional variables in Second Language Acquisition and Multilingualism. He is former president of the International Association of Multilingualism, the European Second Language Association and is current president of the International Association for the Psychology of Language Learning. He is General Editor of the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. He won the Equality and Diversity Research Award from the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (2013), the Robert Gardner Award for Excellence in Second Language and Bilingualism Research from the International Association of Language and Social Psychology (2016) and the Distinguished Scholar Award from the European Second Language Association (2022).