ABSTRACT
Zoltan Dornyei, a wonderful colleague when we both worked at Thames Valley University, once said to me that he was surprised at the consistency and strength of the results Pauline Foster and I found, when we were researching task characteristics and conditions. I was amused by the remark (given partly in jest), and semi-understood it. The chapters in the present volume have enabled me to understand what Zollie said more fully! Clearly what he was getting at was that there are many influences on second language task performance, of which the ones we were exploring were only a subset. Sensitive as he was to wider motivational issues, he was (genuinely) surprised that “our” variables managed to generate significant results even against the background of the many uncontrolled variables that existed – not simply motivation, but, as we see here, personal investment, willingness to communicate, engagement, and emotion. I now appreciate more fully that we were indeed lucky to demonstrate the effects that we did!
