Measuring the impact of watching video fragments in English as a foreign language
Professor Jean-Marc Dewaele obtained £26,110 from the multilingual news television channel Euronews for a research project entitled "Measuring the impact of watching video fragments in English as a foreign language"
Jean-Marc Dewaele
Although every healthy person has some Emotion Recognition Ability, there are individual differences in this ability. This seems to be even truer when people communicate in a language that is not their L1. Both the expression of one’s own emotional state and the comprehension of others’ emotional state is less intuitive when the communication occurs in a foreign language (LX) than when the communication occurs in an L1 (Dewaele, 2013). The question is thus whether recognising emotions in an LX is actually trickier than in the L1, and if so, what could account for this added difficulty (Lorette & Dewaele, 2015). A related question is to what extent LX users watching video fragments displaying different degrees emotionality mirror these emotions in their facial expressions. The value of this type of research is more than purely academic, it has valuable implications for cross-cultural communication in business, the service industry, media organisations and education.
Having come across Dewaele (2013), Sonia Marguin, head of research at Euronews, a multilingual news television channel, contacted us to set up a project on how Hungarian, Greek or Farsi bilinguals (with English as an LX) display different emotions when watching video extracts of news fragments in their L1 or LX. Euronews awarded us a grant of £26,110 to carry out this project, including the cost for a research assistant for 6 months.
References
Dewaele, J.-M. (2013). Emotions in Multiple Languages. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (2nd ed).
Lorette, P. & Dewaele, J.-M. (2015). Emotion recognition ability in English among L1 and LX users of English. International Journal of Language and Culture 2 (1): 62–86. DOI 10.1075/ijolc.2.1.03lor