Abstract
This chapter challenges how the notion of affect has traditionally been conceptualised in Second Language Acquisition (SLA): a ‘filter’ that determines success or failure in language learning. Instead emotions are seen as embodied and creative experiences that allow the individual to experiment with their views of themselves and of the world. Emotions become key to unlock language learners’ inner worlds through social engagement in the new situations of the additional language. This reconceptualisation of emotions builds on the work by critical language educator Sarah Benesch (2012: Considering emotions in critical English language teaching: Theories and Praxis. London: Routledge), cultural theorist Sarah Ahmed (2004: The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press) and social psychologist Margaret Wetherell (2012: Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding. London: Sage) by firmly placing emotions in a social and embodied plane. It proposes that in order to understand language learners’ feelings we need to understand the circulation of feelings in society, how they are appropriated and how they affect us. Emotions are not seen as inherent of certain situations, or as personal projections onto new language learning situations, but rather they are shaped by the continuous dealings in the sociality of the additional language. Such a view will be illustrated by providing examples of how language learners use objects to shape their emotions and to create new meanings.
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Solé, C.R.i. (2016). The Social Promise of Emotions. In: The Personal World of the Language Learner. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52853-7_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52853-7_6
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