Motivation, Language Attitudes and Globalisation: A Hungarian Perspective

Second Language Acquisition

by Zoltán Dörnyei

This volume presents the results of the largest ever language attitude/motivation survey in second language studies. The research team gathered data from over 13,000 Hungarian language learners on three successive in 1993, 1999 and 2004. The examined period covers a particularly prominent time in Hungary’s history, the transition from a closed, Communist society to a western-style democracy that became a member of the European Union in 2004. Thus, the book provides an ‘attitudinal/motivational flow-chart’ describing how significant sociopolitical changes affect the language disposition of a nation. The investigation focused on the appraisal of five target languages – English, German, French, Italian and Russian – and this multi-language design made it also possible to observe the changing status of the different languages in relation to each other over the examined 12-year period. Thus, the authors were in an ideal position to investigate the ongoing impact of language globalisation in a context where for various political/historical reasons certain transformation processes took place with unusual intensity and speed. The result is a unique blueprint of how and why language globalisation takes place in an actual language learning environment.

270 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 1, 2006

About the author

Zoltán Dörnyei worked for 10 years as a language teacher trainer and applied linguist at Eötvös University, Budapest.

He is now Professor of Psycholinguistics at the School of English, University of Nottingham, UK. He has published nearly 100 academic papers and book chapters on various aspects of second language acquisition and language teaching methodology, and he has written over 20 books on motivation, group dynamics, research methodology and the psycholinguistics of second language learning.