Seminar I Reflecting on the "Affective Turn" in Applied Linguistics: Challenges, Obligations, and Opportunities

In recent years, applied linguistics and neighboring fields have witnessed an unprecedented growth of interest in the presence and influence of emotion in language education and our personal and professional lives. This has prompted many scholars to herald a widespread “affective turn” (Pavlenko, 2013) or “turn to emotion” (White, 2016) that finally “engage[s] with emotion as an object and topic in its own right” (Prior, 2019, p. 518). However, even as we celebrate this turn and its exciting potential to illuminate the felt experience of language life, we must also ask: “What are we turning from and to—and why?” In this talk, I will address these questions by tracing key developments in emotion research while highlighting conceptual challenges, ethical/moral obligations, and future opportunities.

Pavlenko, A. (2013). The affective turn in SLA: From ‘affective factors’ to ‘language desire’ and ‘commodification of affect.’ In D. Gabrys–Barker & J. Bielska (Eds.), The affective dimension in second language acquisition (pp. 3–28). Multilingual Matters.

Prior, M. T. (2019). Elephants in the room: An “affective turn,” or just feeling our way? The Modern Language Journal, 103(2), 516-527.

White, C. (2016). Agency and emotion in narrative accounts of emergent conflict in an L2 classroom. Applied Linguistics, 39(4), 579-598.