Motivation, Language Attitudes And Globalisation: A Hungarian Perspective

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.

Zoltán Dörnyei was a Professor of Psycholinguistics at the University of Nottingham, UK. He published extensively on second language acquisition and learner psychology, with a particular focus on language learner motivation.

Kata Csizér is Professor at Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary. She is an Associate Editor of the Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching journal and Co-Editor of the monograph series Applied Linguistics in the 21st Century, published by Akadémiai Kiadó.

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.