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Abstract Language and linguistic research takes a keen interest in the emotional and affective factors that influence language learning. Traditionally, affect and emotion in language and linguistic research has drawn on surveys and questionnaires in attempts to measure, quantify and list pre-determined affects and emotions, often with great overlap between the two concepts. As a result, affect and emotion in language and linguistic research have been psychologized and organized into opposing categories (e.g. positive and negative). More recently, there has been growing interest in the complex ways in which affect, and emotion defy the these opposing categories and pre-determined lists and the embodied nature of emotion and affect. However, this has been difficult to explore with prior methods. In this paper, we explore the potential of body mapping: a method of tracing the outline of one’s body and decorating it (with words/images/painting etc.) emotions and affects related to speaking languages. This acts as an alternative and extension to a well-established method in language and linguistic research: language portraits. Language portraits focus on locating languages on the body, by inviting participants to engage with the senses they relate to speaking languages and map these sensations on the body using their full linguistic repertoire, or all their languages. It also builds on the body mapping method which originally began in health research by explicitly focusing on the role of language in sparking affects and emotion. This case study shares examples from students learning Spanish in Australia and the affects they sense when speaking Spanish and offer examples of students speaking Chinese in the Singapore context. Challenges included troubles with translating particular terms for which we offer suggestions pertaining to the inclusion of multilingual strategies in research.
Heinrichs et al. (Wed,) studied this question.