(1) Crookes, G., & Schmidt, R. W. (1991). Motivation: Reopening the research agenda. Language Learning, 41(4), 469–512.

Aligning with second language acquisition (SLA)'s primary emphasis on processes of language learning rather than teaching, a strong research tradition developed from the 1960s focusing on the role of motivation in successful second language (L2) learning. This tradition originated in bilingual Canada, where attention focused on how motivation to learn the language of another speech community might be affected by social attitudes to that community. While attitudes to the classroom learning situation were also commonly measured in such research, teachers’ perspectives and instructional practices were not among its concerns, as its chief proponent Gardner (Reference Gardner1985) made clear. Thus, despite generating plentiful literature through the 1970s and 1980s, L2 motivation research had little to offer to teachers, which triggered some questioning voices (e.g., Brown, Reference Brown and Alatis1990; Dörnyei, Reference Dörnyei1990).

It was Graham Crookes and Richard Schmidt's (Reference Crookes and Schmidt1991) seminal position paper that provided the most incisive critique of the traditional orthodoxy. Arguing that it ‘has not dealt with motivation at all’ (p. 502) as it focused on distal social attitudes rather than motivational behaviours in the classroom, the authors proposed a new research agenda that adopted a more ‘practitioner-validated’ concept of motivation. I was three months into my Ph.D. when Crookes and Schmidt's article was published in December 1991, but it was several months later before I became aware of it. After all, this was well before the days of digital RSS feeds, social media alerts, or instant online access to journals, and so the literature search for my Ph.D. involved long days in my university's library thumbing through current and back issues of key journals. It was one such day when I came across this issue of Language Learning and found myself transfixed reading this article, since the authors’ arguments aligned so well with my own thinking about the need to reconceptualise L2 motivation. As noted earlier, significant critical debate then ensued through the mid-1990s, leading eventually to a stronger research focus on teachers’ perspectives and practices in relation to motivation in the language classroom. In short, Crookes and Schmidt's paper proved to be a major turning point in our field and remains essential reading for anyone wishing to understand how our field has evolved.

Around a year after I discovered their paper, I gave a presentation on my Ph.D. at the AILA World Congress in Amsterdam in August 1993. While the audience for my first international conference paper was small, my excitement was immense since it included none other than Dick (Richard) Schmidt, wearing a colourful Hawaiian shirt. He took interest in my use of qualitative inquiry (which was then rare in L2 motivation research), and later invited me to contribute to a book he was planning to co-edit with Zoltán Dörnyei (Dörnyei & Schmidt, Reference Dörnyei and Schmidt2001). In short, it was through Dick Schmidt that my professional links with Zoltán began.

(2) Dörnyei, Z. (2001). Motivational strategies in the language classroom. Cambridge University Press.

As I write this manuscript, we are of course mourning Zoltán's recent very untimely loss. Among his inestimable contributions to L2 motivation research, it is essential to highlight his significant efforts to translate this research into pedagogical principles for teachers. Acknowledging the divide between researchers’ interests in motivation as a theoretical construct, and teachers’ practical concerns about motivating their learners, Zoltán sought to bridge this gap in two ways: (a) by developing theorisations that addressed the classroom-situated nature of motivation (Dörnyei, Reference Dörnyei1994) and its process-oriented nature (Dörnyei & Ottó, Reference Dörnyei and Csizér1998); and (b) by writing practical professional development texts for language teachers.

This book was the very first of such texts. It has personal significance for me because it reflects discussions I had with Zoltán around supporting students’ autonomy and positive thinking, and I recall feeling honoured at the time to be cited. The book explains the components of a motivation-sensitive teaching practice subdivided into four phases: creating the basic motivational conditions; generating initial motivation; maintaining and protecting motivation; encouraging positive retrospective self-evaluation. It illustrates a range of motivational strategies that teachers can try out within each phase. While the taxonomy of strategies derived from an empirical study (Dörnyei & Csizér, Reference Dörnyei and Csizér1998), and while the book begins with a theoretical background chapter, its overall orientation is very practical, with the aim of encouraging teachers to experiment with motivational strategies in their classrooms. Indeed, the book concludes with a message inviting teachers to share their experiences of pedagogical experimentation with the author.

In this respect, writing such a book was in itself a piece of experimentation for Zoltán, as he recounted to me during a conference in 2000. As he explained, the book was experimental because he could not be sure how a practical text on motivational strategies for language teachers would be received, whether such a book would work, and indeed whether it would sell. However, he added that he very much hoped it would sell as it was intended to pay for a new kitchen in his house. Well, the fact that this book has well over 5,000 citations (in Google Scholar) today suggests that it must have sold rather a lot of copies. Fundamentally, the book was the first of its kind to translate motivation theory and research into principles for practice, and it paved the way for further professional development texts on motivation for teachers. Importantly, despite the book's practical orientation, it also stimulated plenty of empirical studies and merits reading today for its historical significance in promoting a research focus on teachers’ motivational practices.

(3) Dörnyei, Z., & Kubanyiova, M. (2014). Motivating learners, motivating teachers: Building vision in the language classroom. Cambridge University Press.

Indeed, so successful was Zoltán's motivational strategies book that he was invited a decade later by the publisher to produce an updated second edition. By then, however, he had already developed a new theoretical account of L2 motivation that focused on how language learners visualise themselves in the future, and that highlighted the appealing concept of an imagined ideal L2 self (L2 Motivational Self System; Dörnyei, Reference Dörnyei, Dörnyei and Ushioda2009). This perspective sharpened attention on visualisation methods as key motivational strategies for language learning, and thus led to the writing of this completely new (rather than updated) book focusing on vision-building strategies for motivation. The book furthermore incorporates a detailed account of how to build the motivation and vision of language teachers (as well as language learners), drawing on Maggie Kubanyiova's substantial expertise in this regard.

Actually, when Zoltán and I were working on our 2009 co-edited volume (Dörnyei & Ushioda, Reference Dörnyei and Ushioda2009) in which he gave a full exposition of his new theory, he had asked if I was happy for him to include an extensive pedagogical section in his chapter, even though our book was conceptual and empirical in orientation. Naturally, I said yes. His 2009 chapter thus incorporated a six-page account of vision-building strategies for motivation, which he subsequently expanded into this full book-length treatment in 2014 with Maggie.

Like its 2001 precursor, this book incorporates some background discussion of relevant theory and research, with the aim of synthesising for teachers the core underlying principles for using vision-based strategies in the classroom. Firmly practical in its orientation, the book describes many vision-focused activities that language teachers can adapt for use in their classrooms. Moreover, Zoltán and Maggie offer a clearly articulated framework for pedagogical experimentation on ‘motivating language learners through vision’, which (in my own experience) is valuable in attracting the interest of teachers as well as postgraduate students looking to undertake practitioner research on classroom motivation.

A notable feature of the book (and of Zoltán's writing for teachers in general) is the passionate enthusiasm for the subject matter that comes through. Moreover, as befits a text promoting the use of vision-based motivational strategies, the narrative includes reference to many inspiring examples of people who have used the power of vision to harness and realise their dreams, such as from the field of high-performance sport. Of course, as some readers familiar with my own work may be aware, I have occasionally questioned the parallels drawn between language learning and competitive high-performance sport, since learning a foreign language should be considered neither competitive nor elitist. Interestingly, whenever I dared to share my thinking about this with Zoltán himself, he would simply nod and smile knowingly, and we remained good friends.

(4) Lamb, M. (2017). The motivational dimension of language teaching. Language Teaching, 50(3), 301–346.

The two books by Zoltán that I have placed in this historical section of my bookshelf represent milestones in the emergence of a professional literature on motivation for language teachers through the first decades of this century. Other professional development books duly ensued, such as the ‘recipe-book’ texts on practical ideas for motivating language learners by Hadfield and Dörnyei (Reference Hadfield and Dörnyei2013) and Thorner (Reference Thorner2017). Importantly, as Boo et al. (Reference Boo, Dörnyei and Ryan2015) showed in their review of L2 motivation studies from 2005–2014, this period also saw significant growth of a research literature on teachers’ practices and perspectives in relation to motivation in the language classroom. This included, but was not limited to, research on teachers’ use of general as well as vision-based motivational strategies. It thus makes sense that the next milestone piece in this section of my bookshelf is Martin Lamb's state-of-the-art literature survey on the ‘motivational dimension of language teaching’, which provides a comprehensive overview of this expanding body of research on teachers’ practices and perspectives, and that I have found invaluable as a reference resource when advising my own students.

In this regard, Martin's survey article is especially useful for student-researchers and practitioner-researchers planning to explore the interactions between teaching and classroom motivation, since it offers an excellent point of departure for their own literature searches in relation to certain pedagogical approaches or aspects. The article organises this literature in four categories: studies of motivational strategies; classroom studies that adopt specific theoretical frameworks; studies of pedagogical innovations; and studies of demotivation in L2 classrooms. It also synthesises the key insights and implications from across over 200 pieces of research surveyed, and usefully points to future directions of inquiry for those interested in exploring classroom motivation in practice.

After pulling together this extensive state-of-the-art literature survey, Martin went on to pursue a far larger publication project as lead co-editor of The Palgrave handbook of motivation for language learning (Lamb et al., Reference Lamb, Csizér, Henry and Ryan2019). This substantial handbook runs to nearly 700 pages and includes a dedicated section on L2 motivation in practice as well as several other chapters with a classroom-focused orientation. Yet, as a consolidated starting point for their research explorations on motivation and classroom practice, I always direct my postgraduate students to his valuable survey article instead. Not long after it was published, I recall that I had a conversation with Martin (over a drink) where I wryly suggested that producing this state-of-the-art article would probably lead to plenty of citations (which it has), even if this had not been an underlying motivation. He did not seem to disagree.

(5) Ushioda, E. (2020). Language learning motivation: An ethical agenda for research. Oxford University Press.

So far, the texts in this historical section of my essential bookshelf have been those that represent significant milestones in making motivation research more relevant to language teachers, in terms of how the insights gained from this research can inform teachers’ professional practice and development and shape pedagogical experimentation. However, relevance in this sense implies that the direction is from theory and research to practice. Teachers would appear to be positioned primarily as consumers of research (that has been distilled into accessible general principles and applications for practice), rather than also as producers of research who have their own local questions and agendas to explore and potentially share with the wider academic and professional community. This positioning raises some concerns about the values and purposes of research on classroom motivation, if such research remains largely driven by the abstract goal of developing and validating general theoretical principles for motivating students, rather than by the socially responsive goal of addressing specific motivation-related issues in teachers’ own local classroom realities.

Thus, as the final text in this section of my bookshelf, I have taken the liberty of including a recent slim monograph in which I reflect critically on these ethical questions about the academic versus social values and purposes of our research on language learning motivation and whose interests the research really serves. Of relevance to the focus of this bookshelf collection is the emphasis I give (a) to promoting practitioner research as a form of inquiry that is responsive to teachers’ (and students’) local needs and realities; and (b) to promoting collaborative forms of inquiry among researchers and teachers working together to explore issues in teachers’ classroom contexts. These twin emphases are reflected in the remaining two sections of my bookshelf.

Since publishing this monograph in 2020, I have had the opportunity of discussing its arguments with various audiences in online conferences and webinars. I am told that these arguments are powerful and compelling, but of course I cannot claim that the book has, or will have, any kind of milestone status in the history of our field. However, writing it was a personal milestone for me as it marked the culmination of several years of critical reflection on the research we do on language learning motivation, and so the book has a place in this section of my shelf.

Practitioner research on classroom motivation

I now come to the core section of my bookshelf where I have assembled accounts by five practitioner-researchers who have explored issues of motivation in their own classrooms. I have arranged these in chronological order, not least because the later studies include some cross-referencing back to the earlier studies. As noted already, all five accounts derive from doctoral research that I supervised or (in Richard Sampson's case) externally examined.

(6) Li, N. (2006). Researching and experiencing motivation: A plea for ‘balanced research’. Language Teaching Research, 10(4), 437–456.

I begin with a thought-provoking account by Na Li where she reflects on her attempts to introduce some task-based activities in her English classes in a university in China and to track her students’ motivational perceptions and journey through the term. At the time, published accounts by language teachers undertaking research on motivation in their own classrooms were a rarity, and hence her paper merits especial attention in this regard.

Na Li's account stemmed from her Ph.D. research, which was still in progress when she wrote this piece, and vividly captures the struggles she faced in her fieldwork as a teacher-researcher. These struggles revolved around managing the tensions between pursuing her own agenda as a Ph.D. researcher and attending to her responsibilities as a teacher. She highlights the ethical importance of prioritising our professional responsibilities and adapting to evolving local circumstances when researching motivation in our own classrooms, even if this means diverting from our original research plans and objectives. Na Li was one of my very first Ph.D. students, and so her journey as a novice doctoral researcher and relatively novice teacher became intertwined with my own early journey as a novice doctoral supervisor. In this sense, the struggles she experienced during her fieldwork became my struggles too, and her growth and development as a researcher became my growth and development too.

Na Li's account illustrates the importance of integrating rather than separating pedagogical and research tools, so that the latter become woven into the teaching-learning process and the developing dialogue between teacher and students. This close integration of teaching and researching is, of course, core to the principles of Exploratory Practice (EP; Allwright, Reference Allwright2003) that Na Li adopted as a framework for her practitioner research on classroom motivation. These principles emphasise the importance of working to understand and enhance classroom life, and of integrating this work into one's normal classroom practice as a teacher. These EP principles feature also in two of the later studies in this bookshelf section that were, in part, inspired by Na Li's account. These principles furthermore receive particular focus in my 2020 book in the context of ethical approaches to researching classroom motivation, especially with reference to more recent accounts of EP (e.g., Hanks, Reference Hanks2017, Reference Hanks2019). In this respect, I remain grateful to Na Li for bringing to our attention the relevance and value of EP principles for researching motivation in our classrooms.

(7) Banegas, D. (2013). The integration of content and language as a driving force in the EFL lesson. In E. Ushioda (Ed.), International perspectives on motivation: Language learning and professional challenges (pp. 82–97). Palgrave Macmillan.

The next study in this section is by Darío Banegas, who later went on to publish widely on action research, content and language integrated learning (CLIL), and motivation, which form the focus of this early account based on his Ph.D. research. As Na Li grew to understand through her journey, teachers need to be responsive to their local classroom realities and the needs and interests of their students when researching motivation, instead of simply imposing their own research plans and objectives. Significantly, these dynamic interactions between teachers and students are integral not only to the practitioner research process but also to the organic development of classroom motivation itself. This is a clear and consistent insight provided by all the studies in this bookshelf section, and one that Darío explicitly highlights. His work has especially influenced my thinking about how teachers and students can negotiate their interactions to construct a more motivating learning environment together.

Working in a secondary school English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom in Argentina, Darío undertook action research (with some fellow teachers) to explore how to raise students’ motivation by creating spaces that were ‘characterised by democratised and negotiated practices’ (p. 89), and that engaged students’ voices in identifying topics, sources, and activities for their CLIL lessons. Through successive cycles of action research working with students in this negotiated way, the teachers experienced positive developments in their students’ motivation and their own motivation. Moreover, both students and teachers recognised these positive changes in one another, which in turn enhanced their own motivation in a synergistic way. In this respect, Darío's study remains relevant today since there are clearly links here with more recent work on, for example, positive emotional contagion between teachers and students (e.g., Moskowitz & Dewaele, Reference Moskowitz and Dewaele2021), and interactions between teacher wellbeing and student motivation (e.g., Mercer & Gregersen, Reference Mercer and Gregersen2020).

During Darío's remarkably short and efficient Ph.D. journey (lasting just under three years) when I (as supervisor) could scarcely keep up with his sheer productivity, he also produced several other related publications, including a well-cited article co-authored with his fellow teachers reporting on their collaborative action research (Banegas et al., Reference Banegas, Pavese, Velázquez and Vélez2013). For personal reasons, however, it is this book chapter that merits its place on my shelf as it was published in a volume that I edited on international perspectives on motivation (Ushioda, Reference Ushioda2013). In fact, this was the launch volume for a new book series on international perspectives on English language teaching (ELT) to which Darío himself subsequently contributed not one but two edited volumes addressing international perspectives on CLIL (Hemmi & Banegas, Reference Hemmi and Banegas2021) and diversity in ELT (Banegas et al., Reference Banegas, Beacon and Pérez-Berbain2021).

(8) Sampson, R. J. (2016). Complexity in classroom foreign language motivation: A practitioner research perspective from Japan. Multilingual Matters.

Like Darío, Richard Sampson engaged in action research for his doctoral study of motivation, which focused on his English language classroom in a Japanese college of technology. A major contribution of Richard's work lies in his adoption of complex systems theory as the framework for analysing what happened in his action research cycles, and for capturing the complex relational dynamics through which processes of motivation evolved in the social community of his classroom. This was during a period when, reflecting wider developments in applied linguistics (e.g., Larsen-Freeman & Cameron, Reference Larsen-Freeman and Cameron2008), much attention was focusing on complex and dynamic systems approaches to theorising L2 motivation, and on the methodological challenges that such approaches presented for research (see Dörnyei et al., Reference Dörnyei, MacIntyre and Henry2015).

I initially encountered Richard Sampson during a residential seminar on motivation hosted by JACET (Japan Association of College English Teachers) in 2013. On the last day, I found myself intrigued by Richard's presentation on his action research project, not least because it was one of the few qualitative research accounts presented at the seminar. I sought to speak to him afterwards during dinner, only to discover that he had already departed. After making contact by email instead, I eventually ended up becoming Richard's Ph.D. external examiner.

Based on his Ph.D., Richard's monograph offers a detailed illustration of how action research cycles can yield richly interesting data enabling, and benefiting from, complexity thinking in analysis and theorisation. His account also demonstrates the value of practitioner inquiry for this kind of analytical approach, in that it places the teacher-researcher directly within the complex system under analysis. This facilitates a situated focus on actual people and their individuality, lived experiences, and relational dynamics, instead of the more abstract focus on self-organising systems, components, and processes that we often see in accounts of research that take a complex systems approach. This perspective on humanising complexity research in language education is an important issue that Richard has actively pursued in collaboration with my former Ph.D. student Richard Pinner (Pinner & Sampson, Reference Pinner and Sampson2021; Sampson & Pinner, Reference Sampson and Pinner2021), whose own study is the next to feature on my bookshelf. In fact, I was the person who put the two Richards in touch with one another, as it seemed to me that they shared similar perspectives. I am proud that they have gone on to collaborate so fruitfully.

(9) Pinner, R. S. (2019). Authenticity and teacher-student motivational synergy: A narrative of language teaching. Routledge.

Richard Pinner's monograph is an account of his Ph.D. research, which integrated autoethnography with practitioner inquiry in the form of Exploratory Practice. A significant aspect of Richard's work and of his contribution to L2 motivation research lies in his focus on the concept of authenticity in language teaching and learning and how this relates to motivation. This was a concept that he had already explored extensively in other publications, including a previous book (Pinner, Reference Pinner2016) written while working on his Ph.D. (much to my consternation at the time as his supervisor). He conceptualises authenticity ‘as a process of validating the act of learning/teaching and shared social sense of investment in the process’ (Pinner, Reference Pinner2019, p. 5) and calls this process social authentication. When social authentication happens in the language classroom, this can lead to positive motivational synergy between teacher and students, as he experienced in his English language classroom in Japan. In this respect, Richard's research monograph offers a more extensive theorisation of the synergistic relationship between teacher and student motivation highlighted by Darío Banegas (Reference Banegas and Ushioda2013), and one that resonates strongly with my own thinking about motivation as a socially mediated process.

While Richard's narrative account is extensive (running to 300 pages) and his research is very data rich, he is at pains to point out (p. 264) that most of the data came about through the normal process of teaching and learning in his classroom and through his reflections on this process. As noted earlier in relation to Na Li's (Reference Li2006) study, this approach of deriving data from pedagogic sources and embedding data collection in the teaching and learning process itself is in keeping with the principles of EP that Richard was following. His monograph provides the most richly illustrated published account of EP research on classroom motivation to date and deserves its place on my bookshelf for this reason especially.

Aside from following EP, of course, Richard's project also took the form of an autoethnographic case study as he grew to reflect intensely on his teaching. Subsequently, after he had completed his doctorate, he focused his reflections retrospectively on his Ph.D. journey and, more specifically, on our journey together as supervisor and supervisee. This led him to engage me in collaborating on a duoethnography in which we reflected (suitably dialogically) on the evolution of our working relationship from first encounters to becoming co-authors (Pinner & Ushioda, Reference Pinner, Ushioda, Lowe and Lawrence2020).

(10) Consoli, S. (2022). Practitioner research in a UK pre-sessional: The synergy between Exploratory Practice and student motivation. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 57(May 2022), Article 101108.

The final item in this bookshelf section is an article by Sal Consoli in which he reports on the practitioner research component of his longitudinal Ph.D. project, which used narrative analysis to explore the motivational journeys of Chinese postgraduate students during their year of study at a British university. While student motivation was the core focus of his work, Sal's Ph.D. research led him to develop wider interests in narrative inquiry, researcher reflexivity, and the interface between research and teaching in language education, as reflected in the range of publications and collaborations he has since pursued (e.g., Barkhuizen & Consoli, Reference Barkhuizen and Consoli2021; Consoli & Dikilitaş, Reference Consoli and Dikilitaş2021; Consoli & Ganassin, Reference Consoli and Ganassin2023).

The practitioner research component of his Ph.D. project focused on the summer pre-sessional English course that these students attended prior to their academic programme and that Sal was involved in teaching. As his supervisor, I encouraged Sal to follow in the footsteps of Na Li and Richard Pinner and adopt an Exploratory Practice (EP) approach to researching his students’ motivation. Compared with his predecessors, however, Sal emphasised the EP principle of involving students themselves in pursuing their own personal explorations through asking ‘why’ questions about aspects of British life or academic practice that puzzled them, investigating these questions, and sharing their findings. Sal's account suggests that EP can have clear motivational value for students in this respect, since they viewed it as both relevant practice and valuable social practice and endorsed these learning benefits for themselves. In short, his article usefully demonstrates the affordances that EP can offer not only to teachers researching motivation but also to their students, for whom it can facilitate motivated engagement with learning.

Reflecting his own highly motivated engagement with his subject area, Sal collaborated with another Ph.D. student of mine, Takumi Aoyama, to establish an international Forum on Language Learning Motivation (FOLLM: https://follmresearch.wordpress.com/), aiming to bring together researchers interested in motivation and associated aspects of the psychology of language learning and teaching. FOLLM was launched in March 2017 with an inaugural lecture by Martin Lamb. Since then, it has hosted various events (in the UK and other countries, as well as online) at which several other authors on my essential bookshelf have featured as presenters and/or seminar organisers – notably, Zoltán Dörnyei, Maggie Kubanyiova, Richard Pinner, Richard Sampson, Alastair Henry (in the next bookshelf section), Sal himself and, of course, me.

Practice-based collaborative research on classroom motivation

I come now to the final smaller section of my bookshelf where I have created space for two excellent examples of practice-based collaborative research. These involve teachers working together to explore aspects of motivation in their classrooms, and researchers working with teachers to understand and analyse their motivational practices.

(11) Murphey, T., Falout, J., Fukuda, T., & Fukada, Y. (2014). Socio-dynamic motivating through idealizing classmates. System, 45(August), 242–353.

This paper is by four teacher-researchers in Japan who have worked together on several collaborative studies. I have selected this example since it always stimulates interesting discussion among students taking my module on classroom motivation, with whom I try out activities based on those described. In this paper, Tim Murphey and his colleagues report on an action research study in which they first elicited their Japanese students’ conceptions of ideal L2 classmates, then coded the dataset into general descriptors of ideal L2 classmates, and finally returned these descriptors to their students through a survey. For each descriptor (e.g., ‘Actively talk to lots of partners in English in class’), the survey asked students to indicate how important this ideal behaviour was, whether their classmates were doing it, and whether they themselves were doing it. As Tim and his colleagues observe, their research points to ‘a resonating group-framed motivation effect in which students tend to become more helpful and resourceful for each other’ (p. 242) through this process of imagining one's ideal classmates and then self-reflexively identifying with and modelling these ideal behaviours.

In short, the study illustrates an approach to enhancing classroom motivation that involves students themselves in imagining and creating a more supportive social learning environment. It also demonstrates how practitioner researchers can usefully loop back students’ own response data to them as a focus for reflection and to enhance the teaching-learning dialogue as well as respondent validation. This process of critical participatory looping (Murphey & Falout, Reference Murphey and Falout2010) is a characteristic feature of these teacher-researchers’ practice. Importantly too, this study usefully illustrates collaborative practitioner research that adopts a largely quantitative research design, with survey data collected from English communication classes across four universities. In other words, practitioner research on classroom motivation certainly does not have to be qualitative, even if my own personal orientation is towards qualitative inquiry.

I have had the pleasure of meeting and engaging with members of this group of practitioner-researchers at various conferences in Japan and elsewhere, and I have always secretly envied them for the opportunity they have as university teachers to research motivation in their own language classrooms. This contrasts with my own situation working in a British university where I am not directly involved in teaching English but deliver academic courses in language teacher education. While my sense of professional envy might be directed too towards other practitioner-researchers teaching English or other languages elsewhere, it was first kindled when I came across the richly fascinating work published by this group in Japan.

(12) Henry, A., Sundqvist, P., & Thorsen, C. (2019). Motivational practice: Insights from the classroom. Studentlitteratur AB.

Over a decade ago when concepts of self and identity were taking hold in L2 motivation research, I made the point that the importance of engaging students’ personal and social identities would hardly come as news to experienced language teachers (Ushioda, Reference Ushioda, Murray, Gao and Lamb2011). After all, many would have been practising the principles of learner-centred teaching, personalisation and authentic communication long before L2 motivation research drew attention to these principles. As noted earlier, I therefore believe we need to question the assumption that the direction of influence is always from research to practice.

In this respect, the final item I have chosen for my bookshelf is rather unique in that it reports on a collaborative project between researchers and teachers in which the direction of flow is exactly the opposite, since it is teachers’ practices that inform researchers’ understandings. Essentially, in this Motivational Teaching in Swedish Secondary English (MoTiSSE) project, Alastair Henry and his research colleagues engaged in an ethnographic multiple case study of teachers who were successful motivators. The researchers sought to understand, analyse and theorise these teachers’ motivational language teaching practices, with a view to developing insights for the field as well as practical implications for language teacher education.

While the book itself was written with a readership of Swedish teachers of English in mind and published with a Swedish publisher, its detailed analyses of teachers’ motivational practices clearly have relevance for a wider academic and professional community. Most importantly, the book merits its place on my shelf because it illustrates the value of a different kind of relationship between researchers and teachers from what we usually find in collaborative studies where researchers work with teachers to investigate motivation-related (or other) issues. Such collaborative studies typically involve some form of researcher-led pedagogical intervention (e.g., Nitta & Nakata, Reference Nitta, Nakata, Sampson and Pinner2021; Yashima, Reference Yashima, Sampson and Pinner2021), though Muir (Reference Muir, Sampson and Pinner2021) offers an interesting counterexample of a collaboration that was initiated by a teacher looking to share her experiences of successful motivational practice.

I have known the book's first author, Alastair, for around a decade now. Our professional interactions began when I invited him to write a chapter (Henry, Reference Henry and Ushioda2013) for my volume on international perspectives on motivation, and since then we have mutually contributed to various collections that one or other of us has been involved in co-editing. Our first meeting in person was in Nottingham in August 2014 at the wonderful conference on Motivational Dynamics and Second Language Acquisition organised by Zoltán, which brought together so many scholars working in this field, including quite a few authors from my bookshelf.

Closing reflections in memory of Zoltán

Although I began planning this essential bookshelf some months before we sadly lost our research field's most prolific and passionate scholar, the bookshelf inevitably ended up taking a somewhat different shape. Originally, I had intended to focus only on practitioner research and collaborative research accounts. However, when news of Zoltán's passing came, I felt that I needed to include a substantial historical section and pay tribute to his pivotal role in connecting our research field directly with the work of language teachers. Understanding this historical context and the tremendous legacy that Zoltán has left behind is essential for all teachers and researchers who choose to explore motivation in the language classroom. Consequently, my bookshelf has space for fewer practitioner research accounts than originally planned. I have thus taken the liberty of confining my selection to authors with whom I have had professional and personal interactions over the years. I apologise for omitting further excellent studies that might otherwise have earned a place on the shelf.