The current study set out to examine the role of learner motivation in second language (L2) speech learning in English-as-a-Foreign-Language classrooms. The motivational orientations of 40 firstyear university Japanese students were surveyed via a tailored questionnaire and linked to their spontaneous speech development, elicited via a timed picture description task at the onset and end of one academic semester, in terms of perceived comprehensibility (i.e., ease of understanding) and accentedness (i.e., linguistic nativelikeness). Significant improvement in comprehensibility (but not accentedness) was found among certain individuals. These students likely showed a strong motivation to study English for their future career development as a vague and long-term goal, as well as a high degree of concern for improving comprehensibility, grammatical accuracy and complexity.

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Our current models of bilingual memory are essentially accounts of semantic memory whose goal is to explain bilingual lexical access to underlying imagistic and conceptual referents. While this research has included episodic memory, it has focused largely on recall for words, phrases, and sentences in the service of understanding the structure of semantic memory. Building on the four papers in this special issue, this article focuses on larger units of episodic memory (from quotidian events with simple narrative form to complex autobiographical memories) in service of developing a model of bilingual episodic memory. This requires integrating theory and research on how culture-specific narrative traditions inform encoding and retrieval with theory and research on the relation between (monolingual) semantic and episodic memory (Schank, 1982;Schank & Abelson, 1995;Tulving, 2002). Then, taking a cue from memory-based text processing studies in psycholinguistics (McKoon & Ratcliff, 1998), we suggest that as language forms surface in the progressive retrieval of features of an event, they trigger further forms within the same language serving to guide a within-language/within-culture retrieval.

The last decade has seen a proliferation of studies about emotions in FL teaching and learning. The present study examined three of the most researched and well-known FL emotions to date, namely anxiety, boredom, and enjoyment, and their relationships with learners’ engagement in English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) classes and their EFL proficiency. One hundred and eleven Grade 3–4 EFL children completed a questionnaire and English tests. Various statistical analyses (correlation, hierarchical multiple regression, and path analysis) revealed that all five variables were significantly inter-correlated. Enjoyment was the strongest predictor of engagement and proficiency, followed by boredom. The path analysis indicated that the hypothetical path of emotions→engagement→proficiency did not exist; rather, only two direct relationships were found in the model: Enjoyment→engagement and enjoyment→proficiency. The findings highlight the crucial role of enjoyment for young learners in FL teaching and learning.