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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, Clément's social-contextual model, and Dörnyei'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.

The purpose of the present study was to examine some of the motivations and longitudinal consequences of military service in L2 Swedish for L1 Finnish conscripts in Finland's only Swedish language garrison. Cross-sectional data (N = 42), analyzed with Bayesian path analysis, indicates that promotional instrumentality enhanced participants' L2 ideal selves, but integrative orientation did not. The L2 ideal self predicts L2 learning intentions in the army, but only among learners with low L2 proficiency at the beginning of military service. Longitudinal data (N = 17), analyzed with a Bayesian model selection procedure, shows that after six months in the army, participants reported higher levels of L2 proficiency, lower levels of L2 use anxiety and more positive attitudes towards L2 speakers than at the beginning of military service. ; Peer reviewed