Uncovering Emotivation through Students’ Narratives on Language Learning

The present contribution focuses on EMOTIVATION, a type of self-discovered motivation that is student-activated, which emerged from the analysis of self-narratives produced during a five year long study in the field of second language acquisition (SLA). The research, was carried out at the University of Naples “L’Orientale.” Nearly 500 Italian freshmen students of English as a foreign language (EFL) took part in the research that aimed to identify certainties, preferences, hopes and desires about second language learning (LL2), as well as students’ current/projected visions about themselves and English-related matters.
Autobiographically and anonymously, participants produced a total of nearly 1,000 written narratives written before (pre-V) and after (post-V) a guided visualization (GV). GVs were carried out using the Neuro-Linguistic-Programming (NLP) framework. Digitalized narratives were clustered in the EFL P.Æ.C.E . Corpus. Ongoing qualitative analysis has brought to light unexpected features, uncovered emotions, showed students’ realities, and opened interesting windows for analyses on second language (L2). EMOTIVATION, in particular, shows a new pedagogical path to educators who intend to obtain successful results in language teaching/learning.