Positive and negative emotions underlie motivation for L2 learning

By P. Macintyre, L. Vincze. 2017

311 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The role of basic emotions in SLA has been underestimated in both research and pedagogy. The present article examines 10 positive emotions (joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and love) and 9 negative emotions (anger, contempt, disgust, embarrassment, guilt, hate, sadness, feeling scared, and being stressed). The emotions are correlated with core variables chosen from three well-known models of L2 motivation: Gardner’s integrative motive, Clement’s social-contextual model, and Dornyei’s L2 self system. Respondents came from Italian secondary schools, and most participants were from monolingual Italian speaking homes. They described their motivation and emotion with respect to learning German in a region of Italy (South Tyrol) that features high levels of contact between Italians and Germans. Results show that positive emotions are consistently and strongly correlated with motivation-related variables. Correlations involving negative emotions are weaker and less consistently implicated in motivation. The positivity ratio, that is, the relative prevalence of positive over negative emotion, showed strong correlations with all of the motivation constructs. Regression analysis supports the conclusion that a variety of emotions, not just one or two key ones, are implicated in L2 motivation processes in this high-contact context.

Subfields: Language and Linguistics, Literature and Literary Theory

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/11bcd126ab81aafbf974b9e80cbaec9d31330f7d

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Citations in the corpus

Exploring the Fluctuations of Foreign Language Enjoyment in Conversation: An Idiodynamic Perspective (2018, background): “This can also be supported by MacIntyre and Vincze (2017) concluding that the more the learners are amused and the more they are interested in the task, the more they will enjoy themselves both in the task and in language learning which can be applied to the task of conversation about intriguing…”
Conceptualisation and measurement of foreign language learning burnout among Chinese EFL students (2021, background): “…guilt and shame (Galmiche 2017;Teimouri 2018), pride (Abo-Zaied Arar and Tannenbaum 2019), love (Pavelescu and Petri ć 2018), anger, excitement, hope, joy, frustration (MacIntyre et al. 2019; MacIntyre and Vincze 2017), and boredom (Kruk 2019; Li2021 ; Li, Dewaele, and Hu 2021; Pawlak et al. 2020).”
Advanced learners’ foreign language-related emotions across the four skills (2018, background): “Instead of concentrating on just one or two emotions, MacIntyre and Vincze (2017) attempted to link 10 positive and 9 negative distinct emotions to models of motivation (which included language anxiety as a motivational construct) on a sample of Italian language learners studying German in a…”
ROLE OF THE EMOTIONS AND CLASSROOM ENVIRONMENT IN WILLINGNESS TO COMMUNICATE (2017, background): “There is a wide range of both positive and negative emotions (such as amused, grateful, proud, anger, embarrassed, and shame) that can be examined regarding WTC in future studies (see MacIntyre & Vincze, 2017, who studied the relationships among 19 emotions and motivation-related variables).”
Understanding Chinese high school students’ Foreign Language Enjoyment: Validation of the Chinese version of the Foreign Language Enjoyment scale (2018, unknown): “Barton (1997) and Dewaele et al. (2016) also observed that learners’ perceptions and attitudes towards different foreign languages may also vary, which make the specific socio-cultural-linguistic context an important variable (Oxford, 2016; MacIntyre, 2017; Pavelescu & Petrić, 2018).”
The dimensions of foreign language classroom enjoyment and their effect on foreign language achievement (2018, background): “MacIntyre and Vincze (2017) also noted that emotions underpin motivation for L2 learning.”