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. 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.

Marital and parenting systems are likely to interact during the first year of an infant’s life. This study examines the longitudinal interrelations of relationship satisfaction and parental reflective functioning (PRF) and their predictive relations with later emotional availability (EA) and infant social-emotional behaviors (SEB) including skills as well as behavioral problems among first-time Finnish mothers and fathers (n = 556). The follow-up period was between three and 12 months. In addition to having direct effects, we examined a mediational model in which self-reports on PRF factors of interest and curiosity and appropriateness of reasoning would mediate the effects of previous relationship satisfaction to the parent and dyadic side of EA and infant SEB at 12 months. The results show significant stability for relationship satisfaction and PRF for both mothers and fathers as well as direct effects on EA and SEB. However, we found differences between mothers and fathers. For mothers, path analysis indicated support for a mediational model where earlier relationship satisfaction predicted later EA and infant problem behaviors also through the current level of PRF. For fathers, both relationship satisfaction and PRF had direct, but not mediated, effects, and on both infant problem behaviors as well as infant social competence. Together, despite these differences, focusing clinically on both relationship satisfaction and PRF may prove significant in preventing later relational and/or infant difficulties in SEB for both mothers and fathers.

This article tests a model predicting minority language television consumption. We examine how four media gratifications (diversion, ethnolinguistic identity, surveillance, parasocial companionship) Analysis indicates that diversion (entertainment) and ethnolinguistic identity gratifications for watching ingroup language television are the strongest mediators of the influence of identification on ingroup language television use. We examined four moderators of these indirect effects (objective vitality, subjective vitality, intergroup contact, and intragroup contact). The moderators revealed a number of rather complex effects which are discussed with regard to the local intergroup context and broader issues of media and intergroup relations.The goal of the present article is to explore the role of ethnolinguistic identification in driving motivations for television use in minority group bilingual

This article addresses the relationships between media, media use and language retention. In pursuing this aim, we explore the utility of ethnolinguistic vitality (EV) as a fruitful conceptual tool. The extant research on the relationship between the media and language retention and development provides an encouragement to pursue in more detail the role of media in this process: in other words to address more explicitly the features of media operation, and their relationship to audiences, which interface with the dynamics of EV. Based on four case studies of bilingual communities, the article concludes that media can be an important vehicle in maintaining and supporting EV. The extent to which this can be reached depends mostly on objective factors, such as the institutional completeness of the media landscape.

Within the framework of communication accommodation theory, this study examined how self-reported motives for linguistic convergence and divergence by speakers of majority and minority languages (in demographic terms) predict language use in Finland, a bilingual country. In so doing, we also offer a novel approach to modeling motivation for linguistic accommodation. For majority language speakers, motives to converge, but not motives to diverge, were significant predictors of linguistic convergence to the outgroup. However, the opposite pattern was found for minority language speakers. To our knowledge, this is the first study to model how multiple self-reported motives for language use theorized by communication accommodation theory jointly map onto linguistic behavior in a bilingual setting.