Provides tools to enable teachers to improve their own motivation, and thereby that of their students. A new approach to motivation, focusing on the concept of 'vision'. Drawing on visualisation research in sports, psychology and education, the authors describe powerful ways by which imagining future scenarios can promote motivation to learn a language. The book offers a rich selection of motivational strategies to help students 'see' themselves as competent language users, to experience the value of knowing a foreign language and, ultimately, to invest effort into learning it. It also explores how to re-ignite language teacher enthusiasm, how to re-kindle it when it may be waning and how to guard it when it is under threat.

The Psychology of Second Language Acquisition offers a systematic and accessible overview of the main psychological areas and theories in order to keep abreast of the ongoing paradigm shift. Readers will find succinct and up-to-date descriptions of a wide range of psycholinguistic and neuropsychological topics such as language and the brain; neuroimaging and other research methods in psycholinguistics and brain research; non-nativist approaches to language acquisition; explicit/implicit learning and memory, procedural/declarative knowledge, and the automatization of language skills; learner characteristics, age effects, and the critical period hypothesis; and the psychological basis of language learning in educational contexts.

This is a very practical and accessible book that offers a comprehensive overview of research methodology in applied linguistics by describing the various stages of qualitative and quantitative investigations, from collecting the data to reporting the results. It also discusses mixed methods research, that is, the various combinations of qualitative and quantitative methodologies.

The study of groups — 'group dynamics' — is a vibrant academic field, overlapping diverse disciplines. It is also highly relevant to language education because the success of classroom learning is very much dependent on how students relate to each other, what the classroom climate is like, what roles the teacher and the learners play and, more generally, how well students can co-operate and communicate with each other. This innovative book addresses these issues and offers practical advice on how to manage language learner groups in a way that they develop into cohesive and productive teams.

This volume gives an overview of the theory of motivation and applies it to practical skills and strategies, providing new insights into the field of motivational studies and its implications for second-language pedagogy.