Emotions and Affect in Language Learning

This book explores emotions and affect in language learning during total lockdown during the early phase of the COVID‑19 pandemic when all teaching and learning activities had to transition online. Having classes online and learning in lockdown was an unknown, disconcerting, and emotionally saturated experience for both the teachers and their students majoring in foreign languages.

To explore this, the author conducted a study at a Malaysian university using perezhivanie, a concept introduced by Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934), as a theoretical foundation for pedagogically oriented research on affect and emotions. It refers to an intense emotional lived‑through experience that often leads to a qualitative change within an individual. To capture the students’ experiences of learning in total lockdown, she also employs photovoice methodology as an analytical approach. In her book, Nikitina demonstrates using the photovoice method to capture the emotional ebbs and flows inherent in perezhivania. The theoretical framework of perezhivanie and novel photovoice methodology adopted in this book can be employed in future explorations of emotional labours of students and their teachers in a wide range of educational settings.

This book’s theoretical anchoring, robust methodology, and rigorous analysis of visual and linguistic data findings presented in this book will contribute to a better understanding of learning and teaching during challenging circumstances for students and academics of applied linguistics, psychology of language learning, or second language acquisition.

Larisa Nikitina is an Associate Professor at Universiti Malaya, Malaysia. Her research focuses on psychological and emotional factors involved in learning additional languages. Her other research interests include quantitative methods in applied linguistics and natural language processing. She has published extensively in prominent academic journals.