Identity is of increasing interest in teacher education. Crucial for resilience, the development of a coherent professional identity has been characterized as emerging from tensions between multiple and sometimes conflicting conceptions of what it means to be someone who teaches (Akkerman & Meijer, 2011). While light is being shed on these…

Imagination is rarely acknowledged as one of the main workhorses of learning. Unfortunately, disregarding the imagination has some clearly negative pedagogical impacts: Learning is more ineffective than it should be and much schooling is more tedious than it need be. In this paper, we outline a somewhat new way of thinking about the process of…

Vision, that is, the mental representation of the sensory experience of a future goal state (involving imagination and imagery), is currently at the forefront of motivational innovation, and in recent years it has been seen increasingly more often in the motivational tool kit of practicing language teachers. Theories such as Dörnyei's L2…

The imagination is powerful, in part, because of the emotions that can be activated by imagining future states. Imagined future states are a key feature of the L2 self-system proposed by Dornyei, and emotion may be the key to the motivational quality of the imagined future self. In particular, this paper focuses on positive anticipated and…

This paper explores pedagogical practices which can support the role of imagination in foreign language learning. Over the past decade, work on self and identity in motivation research--most notably Norton's (2001) imagined communities and Dörnyei's (2009) L2 motivational self system--has suggested that teachers might foster students' motivation…

In order to initiate and maintain meaningful interaction in a young learner L2 classroom, an adult teacher needs to approach children in ways consistent with their developmental profile and adjust teaching methodology so as to accommodate young learners' current skills. This requires the ability to predict the child's possible responses to…