Why would a Hungarian living in Britain and an American living in the Far East – both practising language teacher-researchers – decide to write a book together? And why on ‘group dynamics’ of all topics? Here are our personal accounts:

Zoltán

As a practising language teacher I often felt that the field of psychology had a lot to offer me on how to teach better. This is why when I decided to do postgraduate work in the area, I selected a psychological topic, the role of motivation in foreign language learning. During my studies I spent a lot of time in libraries trying to trace down various literature leads and references that I came across in my reading. One such lead suggested that student motivation was sometimes influenced by the learner group – something every student knows who has worried about getting along with his or her new peers. Before long, I realised that groups did much more than just ‘pull down’ or ‘up’ a learner. They have a life of their own and – to my great surprise – this life had been the subject of a whole subdiscipline within the social sciences called group dynamics. My next surprise came when I found out that this vigorous and, from an educational point of view, extremely relevant subdiscipline was virtually unknown in the second language (L2) field, so I quickly added a chapter to my dissertation describing its basic principles.