Well-being is a basic human right according to the World Health Organization. It is the foundation of a life well lived and ought to be the basis of all educational endeavours and encounters. In this article, I urge ELT to make well-being a priority for research and practice. I make three main points. Firstly, we need to be serious in defining and…

In this article we introduce Positive Psychology (PP), a relatively new subfield of psychology, and outline its development since the year 2000. We describe ways in which PP represents an exciting addition to the Second Language Acquisition (SLA) literature and the ways it is already influencing trends in education generally, thus creating…

There is a wide body of research that shows how vitally important teachers are to successful learning processes. What they do, think, feel and believe are central to what happens in their classrooms, and, essentially, what happens to their learners. It is perhaps, therefore, surprising that the field of language learning psychology has focused so…

This article begins with an outline of the developments in Positive Psychology (PP) generally and specifically within SLA focusing on theoretical, empirical and practical developments. It moves on to consider PP's potential contribution to language teaching focusing on how it can help promote emotional, social and psychological wellbeing for…

Research into the psychology of language learning has grown exponentially in the last decade, yet, teacher perspectives on the field have been surprisingly absent from this body of research. The present study was designed to address this gap. Drawing on a survey with 311 foreign language teachers working at different school levels in 3 European…

This paper reports on a study investigating the mindsets of 51 pre-service teachers at an Austrian university using Q methodology. Despite the recent growth in interest in the concept of mindsets, little research has addressed the mindsets of teachers--most of it focusing on the mindsets of learners--and the research that does investigate teachers…

Every individual has a different perspective on time, known as "temporal perspective". A person's orientation and attitude towards time can have a profound effect on their behaviour and motivation. In Second Language Acquisition, a variety of work has considered learners and their behaviours from various temporal perspectives. However,…

Recent developments in SLA, such as learner-centredness, social constructivism, the postmethod era, and complexity perspectives, have highlighted the need for more localized, situated understandings of teaching and learning and greater recognition of learner individuality and diversity. In this article, I suggest an effective way of meeting these…

This article explores the potential offered by complexity theories for understanding language learners' sense of self and attempts to show how the self might usefully be conceived of as a complex dynamic system. Rather than presenting empirical findings, the article discusses existent research on the self and aims at outlining a conceptual…

This article explores the role of the psychological construct of "implicit theories" or "mindsets" in the context of foreign language learning. It considers psychology-based research of the construct in respect to the EFL context and reports on a small exploratory study using interviews carried out with tertiary-level learners…