Emotions in SLA: New Insights From Collaborative Learning for an EFL Classroom

What is the role and meaning of emotions in the second language learning process? To respond to this question, this article focuses on how learners' emotions manifest in their verbal communication over the course of a semester-long joint task. Recognizing interpersonal, functional, and developmental aspects of emotions, I illustrate how a group of English-as-a-foreign-language learners discursively constructed and shared their emotional attitudes toward their group work and how such emotional intersubjectivity pushed the group, in their knowledge co-construction, to challenge assigned tasks and material. I argue that emotions do not merely facilitate, filter, or hinder an individual's inner cognitive functioning; rather, they can in any forms mediate development, especially when learning is embedded in an interpersonal transaction. I end by considering implications of the study and its limitations.