ABSTRACT
“Emotions are at the heart of what it means to be human. Indeed, emotions are at the heart of what it means to be alive” (Fox, 2008, p. XV). As Fox’s observation indicates, emotions are fundamental and ubiquitous companions of our lives. Given their omnipresent and indispensable nature, the ability to talk about emotions is an inherent part of our communicative competence as well. Since successful communication in the target language is the primary goal of foreign language teaching and learning, facilitating students’ ability to use the emotion vocabulary of their target language in interaction also belongs to the essential tasks of the classroom setting. Accordingly, the present study strives to shed light upon what a predominantly instructed access to English as a foreign language (EFL) empowers learners to do in the target language communication of feelings. More precisely, it raises the question of how the contextual parameter of interlocutors’ social status guides the lexical choices EFL learners and L1-English users make to talk about feelings. This inquiry is perused in speech data elicited from 29 Austrian teenage learners of EFL and 15 pupils of the same age from the UK by means of three distinct data collection instruments (visual prompts, self-reports and situated role-plays). Results are indicative of the probability that cultural and linguistic proximity between source and target language may be successfully exploited by instructed foreign language learners in the communication of feelings.
