Positive psychology is a rapidly expanding subfield in psychology that has important implications for the field of second language acquisition (SLA). This paper introduces positive psychology to the study of language by describing its key tenets. The potential contributions of positive psychology are contextualized with reference to prior work,…

Emotional intelligence has not been widely studied in second language acquisition and studies published to date have been questionnaire-based. In this study we take a qualitative approach to focus on how emotional intelligence is used by two participants, one a learner and the other a pre-service teacher. The two focal participants were selected…

In a study of language anxiety, a video camera was introduced at various points in a vocabulary learning task. Observations of first-year university students of French revealed significant increases in anxiety when the camera was introduced, along with concomitant deficits in vocabulary acquisition. Implications for remedial action are discussed.…