This study responds to calls for more research on motivations for learning languages other than English (LOTEs) in the new era dominated by global English. In particular, it focuses on the role of societal contextual factors surrounding the status of English and the status of the LOTE as an L2/L3, as factors which may offer a more nuanced…

This article examines secondary school learners' motivation to learn English as a foreign language (EFL) in relation to two contextual factors: school type and school location. Data were collected from 352 Polish learners who attended English instruction in general and technical secondary schools in a large city and a small town in western Poland.…

Despite a growing focus on positive psychology in recent years, negative emotions have not ceased to play a crucial role in learning additional languages in the classroom. This paper reports a study that investigated one such negative emotion -- boredom -- as experienced by 115 advanced learners of English. They were asked to write a descriptive…

Although boredom can be regarded as a ubiquitous emotion in most educational settings, including foreign and second language classrooms, and this condition can have a detrimental effect on the process of learning, it has to a large extent escaped the attention of second language acquisition researchers dealing with individual learner differences.…

The integration of mobile technology in language education represents notable progress, providing a versatile tool for learners of different ages to acquire a language. The poster will focus on research evaluating the efficacy of the Duolingo mobile app in augmenting Russian language proficiency for A1 and B1 level students at the University of…

The concept of learner engagement, widely researched in educational psychology, has recently gained attention of language acquisition researchers (cf. Mercer, S. and Z. Dörnyei. 2020. "Engaging Students in Contemporary Classrooms." Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Mercer, S. 2019. Language learner engagement: setting the scene. In…

Although recent years have seen a growing interest in positive emotions in second or foreign language learning and teaching, negative emotions are always present in the classroom and they deserve to be investigated in their own right. The article focuses on boredom, a construct that has been explored in educational psychology but has received only…

The paper investigates how the type of business content found in the reading materials offered by a popular Business English course book as well as the degree of the content's relevance and usefulness, are perceived by pre-service students learning Business English as part of their university curriculum. Twelve groups of first year undergraduate…

This exploratory, retrospective study, which focuses on the needs, attitudes, and emotions of learners attending English as a foreign language courses at the Open University of the University of Warsaw is part of a larger scale project which aims at answering calls voiced, among others, by Boulton-Lewis (2010) to gather more data from older adults…

Globally, the number of adults aged over 50 is increasing and this group is becoming more active in second language (L2) learning. Despite these demographic changes, little research has focused on the issues faced by older learners. They are either omitted from research studies or viewed as part of a homogenous group of adult learners. Several…

Socio-economic status (SES) has been consistently shown to influence students' educational achievement, but to date, few studies have investigated the role of SES in language learning motivation. This study aims to examine to what extent two indicators of SES, school location and parents' education, affect motivation of Polish 15-year-olds to…

The article looks at language learner autonomy as a social construct in relation to the context and its user based on the example of "Italki", a social networking site for tandem language learning. Considering the two foci--the context and the learner--the study is divided into two parts, both carried out from the perspective of online…

This study investigated the consistency of a measure of integrative motivation in the prediction of achievement in English as a foreign language in 18 samples of Polish school students. The results are shown to have implications for concerns expressed that integrative motivation might not be appropriate to the acquisition of English because it is…

While it is commonly assumed that teaching children is unrelated to teaching at the advanced level, the two kinds of teaching are closely related and mutually effective. The experience of teaching young learners can benefit the instruction of college students of English as a second language. In both cases, providing motivation is a challenge.…