Empirical Research on Emotions, Motivation, Self-Efficacy, and Flow with the Help of Tasks

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of empirical research carried out in connection with emotions, motivation, self-efficacy, and flow on language tasks. The aim was to synthesize the findings of the reviewed studies, which proved to be a difficult task due to the different methodologies and the variety of measures involved. Task-based investigations of emotions only seem to be concerned with anxiety, reflecting the need for further research in this area. Task motivation studies suggest a link between this construct and various quantitative and qualitative task performance measures. Although there are a number of studies investigating self-efficacy and flow with the help of tasks, the ways in which these constructs might be linked to learners’ output on tasks remains largely unclear due lack of research in this regard.