When Elephants Fly: The Lift‐Off of Emotion Research in Applied Linguistics

This evolution in the field of applied linguistics created a propitious climate for research on emotion, which allows a wide variety of approaches.Etic, quantitative emotion research had been around in psychology for many decades.The new emic approach allowed applied linguists to delve into participants' emotions which are "not necessarily open to etic or outside observation" (Pomerantz, 2013, p. 1).I agree with Prior that the terms 'turn' and 'paradigm shift' risk being used a bit too casually and could lead to simplifications of a more complex and messy reality.The emergence of emic approaches caused an epistemological re-balancing of the field that allowed emotion research to blossom but it did not mean an outright rejection of etic research (Dewaele, 2019).For example, Pavlenko (2007) argued that autobiographic narratives should be considered as valid data for applied linguists but they also pleaded for triangulation: "participants' stories are interpretations, and not representations, of reality, and are best used in conjunction with other means of data collection" (Pavlenko, 2007, p. 324).In that Pavlenko agreed with Wierzbicka' preface (2004) to a special issue we co-edited: "It seems clear that if we want to tap that knowledge of bilingual persons a wide variety of approaches must be allowed and attempted" (p.104).Prior also wonders whether the current interest in emotion represents a proper turn or merely an "affective bandwagon" before adding that emotion seems to have become accepted as a serious topic of investigation rather than a "curious' epiphenomenon".One very crude way to answer this question is through the Google English books Ngram viewer.A search of the occurrence of the word "emotion" from the 1960 to the most recent 2008 data shows an elongated U-shaped curve, starting at .0018%, dipping to .0014% in 1979 and raising to .0023 in 2008, with a steeper incline since 2000.Doing a keyword search for "emotion" in the journal Applied Linguistics revealed 163 hits.Only one article mentioned "emotion" before 2002.A total of 120 articles containing the word were published since 2010.Repeating the same search with The Modern Language Journal revealed 880 hits.A total of 700 articles or reviews contained the word "emotion" between 1917 and 2009, which is an average of 7.6 per year.Since 2010 another 180 articles contained the word "emotion", which is an average of 22.5 per year.In other words, the frequency of the word "emotion" has trebled in MLJ in the past 8 years.Considering the three sources of evidence, I would argue that we are witnessing maybe not a true turn but rather a sharp increase in interest in emotion.It is definitely more than an "affective bandwagon".Another conclusion that can be drawn from this is that interest and research on emotion has been around for a long time, as Prior points out, in a variety of ontological, epistemological and methodological approaches, and that it waited for favourable circumstances to bloom.Re-reading the previous paragraphs, I realise that these comments must come across as pretty dry and disembodied to students and young researchers.I do not wish to perpuate the myth that "Big Ideas" descend from heaven and that researchers are mere conduits.Another false impression that I might create is that all the researchers cited so far, including Prior and myself, peer over the parapet of our ivory towers to throw some new arguments and evidence at the opposition and then retreat to the safety of our chair.While there is something in that, the reality is very different and much messier than one might expect.In other words, there is no teleology.We were not predestined to do research on emotion.We just stumbled across it in journals and at conferences, and it caught our attention.Let me illustrate this with my venture into the area of emotion.In 1999 I missed Aneta Pavlenko's presentation that mentioned the word "emotion" in the abstract at the Second International Symposium on Bilingualism organised by Li Wei at the University of Newcastle.Luckily the progamme contained her email address so I contacted her later apologising for having missed her paper at the conference.She answered that she had