Abstract

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 occasions: 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.

Ambitious in its scope and remarkable for its foresight and vision, the study offers no less than a unique historical record of changing attitudes to language learning among a central European nation’s youth, during a decade of significant sociopolitical reconfiguration within Europe and increasing globalisation.

The volume describes a ground-breaking study, one whose results will affect the direction of L2 motivation and attitude research for years to come. Dörnyei, Csizér, and Németh should be commended for providing the field with this large and detailed study on L2 learning motivation and attitudes. It is an absolute must for any researcher or graduate student interested in L2 motivation or attitudes.

Professor Zoltán Dörnyei, who is one of the leading international experts on L2 attitude/motivation research, led the Hungarian research team. He has written over 60 academic papers on various aspects of second language acquisition, and is the author of several books, including Teaching and Researching Motivation (2001, Longman), Questionnaires in Second Language Research: Construction, Administration, and Processing (2003, Lawrence Erlbaum) and The Psychology of the Language Learner: Individual Differences in Second Language Acquisition (2005, Lawrence Erlbaum). Kata Csizér and Nóra Németh are L2 researchers and teacher trainers at the Department of English Applied Linguistics, Eötvös University, Budapest. They have published academic papers for Hungarian and international journals, including Language Teaching Research, Language Learning, The Journal of Language and Social Psychology, The Modern Language Journal and Applied Linguistics.

This volume is an impressive piece in many ways. It focuses on language attitudes and motivation caused by sociopolitical changes and language globalisation. It uncovers many useful and groundbreaking findings.