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Hi! I’m Thomas Stringer. This portal features resources for learners, practitioners, and researchers on language learner autonomy or related topics.
October 2025 Feature Post: Beyond The Abstracts Season 2
This series goes Beyond The Abstracts, featuring behind the scenes conversations with researchers and educational practitioners in language learner autonomy or related fields.
Beyond The Abstracts: Tangled Webs – Pia Resnik and Elouise Botes (October 2025, Season 2 Episode 3)
“If you have a level of autonomy over your English studies, because we measured it through study habits and learning environments, then you would be more likely to have a higher achievement. So, a higher grade in your English class and you would be more likely to be willing to speak in English. And then when we included anxiety and enjoyment in this relationship as well, we see that autonomy was positively related to enjoyment and negatively related to anxiety”
– Elouise Botes
In this episode, Tom speaks with Pia Resnik and Elouise Botes about their new article: A Tangled Web: Learner Autonomy as a Predictor of Learner Emotions, Willingness to Communicate and Academic Achievement in Online Language Learning, which was published in 2025 in Language Teaching Research Quarterly:
Pia Resnik is Professor of ELT Research and Methodology at the University College of Teacher Education, Vienna|Lower Austria (KPH), Austria, training pre-service primary and secondary teachers at the KPH and the University of Vienna. Her research interests include all aspects surrounding multi-competent LX users of English, with a particular focus on emotions in multilingual contexts and the psychology of language learning and teaching. In her research, she prefers to employ mixed methods approaches to capture the complexity of the phenomena studied. Her current research investigates the context-sensitivity of learner emotions, willlingness to communicate, learner autonomy, and the emotional sources of engagement and flow, as well as foreign language teacher wellbeing and its implications for teachers’ emotions in the FL classroom. She is currently serving on the leadership team of the Emotion Special Interest Group and the board of the International Association for the Psychology of Language Learning.
Elouise Botes a post-doctoral researcher in Psychology at the Cognitive Science and Assessment Institute and the Luxembourg Centre for Educational Testing at the University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg. She is an inter-disciplinary researcher examining the role of individual differences in language learning, using concepts from both psychology and applied linguistics in her work. She works primarily with quantitative data and is especially interested in advanced research methods. She was recently awarded with the Early Career Researcher Award from the International Association for the Psychology of Language Learning and is on the editorial board for the Journal of Multicultural and Multilingual Development. Her current research explores conceptual methodological issues in the field such as effect size interpretations, limitations of measurement, and ethical issues regarding generative AI use.
Learn more:
- Botes, E., Resnik, P., Moskowitz, S., Dewaele, J.-M., Mercer, S. & Greiff, S. (2025). A tangled web: Learner autonomy, emotions and their impact on learners’ willingness to communicate and their grades in online EFL classes. Special Issue in honor of Peter MacIntyre. Language Teaching Research Quarterly, 48, 10–29. https://doi.org/10.32038/ltrq.2025.48.02
- Resnik, P., & Dewaele, J.-M. (2023). Learner emotions, autonomy and trait emotional intelligence in ‘in-person’ versus emergency remote English foreign language teaching in Europe. Applied Linguistics Review, 14(3), 473–501. https://doi.org/10.1515/applirev-2020-0096
- Resnik, P., Dewaele, J.-M., & Knechtelsdorfer, E. (2023). How teaching modality affects Foreign Language Enjoyment: A comparison of in-person and online English as a Foreign Language classes. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching. https://doi.org/10.1515/iral-2023-0076
- Resnik, P., Dewaele, J.-M., & Knechtelsdofer, E. (2023). Differences in the intensity and the nature of foreign language anxiety in in-person and online EFL classes during the pandemic: A mixed-methods study. TESOL Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.3177
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