Movitation and SLA

I'm in the middle of (or should currently be) conducting a literature review for my last (official!) grad course.  I decided to add on to my current lit review on SLA in the secondary classroom.  Initially I examined the research on best practices in promoting SLA.  Guess what I found?  TPRS/CI is the way to go. Duh! :)
But this time I wanted to see how student motivation played a factor in the classroom.  I believe that students who do not succeed in others' classrooms, sometimes succeed in mine (and vice versa) due to motivation-related factors. 
Why did I write this blog post?  Well I wanted to share two things that I am finding:
1) Anxiety and motivation are very closely related.  As anxiety increases in students, motivation decreases along with achievement.
2) Much of the research on the topic of motivation (and subsequently anxiety) in the SLA process is coming from Asia because of reforms in language teaching mandated by the government.  Specifically, Japan has initiated several major reforms at the high school level which aims to replace the grammar-translation approach to teaching.  Go Japan! 

Japan's progress makes me salivate; and the correlation between anxiety, motivation and achievement seems so obvious, but if it were so obvious to others (eh hum, administrators?) then the research wouldn't be needed.

Student Motivation

I recently go added to the #LangChat distribution list.  It has been pretty great so far to hear what is going on in that realm.  (Side note: I call it "that realm" because I don't really even know how to use hash tags!) But they recently sent out an interesting topic of how to motivate students to start and stay with world languages.  Obviously, as a language teacher, I think learning other languages is very important, but the best way to maintain students in our programs once they start is to capture their hearts and imaginations. 
I also think it's important to help them see that they indeed can acquire and use another language; that it is not some elite skill reserved for the 4% of "smart" students. 

If you're interested in knowing more, here's the link!  Also, they have a really neat FREE e-book recently out.  I would search for and download that too. 

Hope everyone's second semester is off to a wonderful start!