Zoltán Dörnyei

His dissertation was entitled Art dealing in Hungary before 1945.

Zoltán Dörnyei (11 March 1960 – 10 June 2022) was a Hungarian-born British linguist.

He was a professor of psycholinguistics at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom.

He was known for his work on second language acquisition and the psychology of the language learner, in particular on motivation in second language learning, having published numerous books and papers on these topics.

Dörnyei obtained a combined Master of Arts degree in English language and literature and in art history in 1985 at the School of English and American Studies of the Faculty of Humanities of the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary.

He began his career at the School of English and American Studies of the Faculty of Humanities of the Eötvös Loránd University in 1988.

In 1989 he received a PhD degree in Psycholinguistics at the Eötvös Loránd University and his thesis was entitled Psycholinguistic factors in foreign language learning.

In 1998, he moved to the United Kingdom and after two years at Thames Valley University, London, he took up a position at the School of English, University of Nottingham, where he was Professor of Psycholinguistics.

Dörnyei's theory of motivation is the idea that motivation is developed in a unique and dynamic way that is necessary to gain success in areas where prolonged learning is required.

The process-oriented model of motivation seeks to explain Dörnyei's theory through student motivation by focusing on (a) motivational maintenance and volition, and (b) motivational evolution and fluctuation.

This model shifts the emphasis from the historic assumptions of pre-actional ‘choice motivation’ to volitional/executive aspects of goal attainment during the actional phrase.

This model is rooted in the assumption that people unconsciously monitor their motivation and make adjustments or choices to increase or decrease motivation based on the outcome of their current goals.

The first dimension of the behavioural process indicates a motivational influence (wishes, hopes, and desires).

These influences indicate a starting point for the motivational process and are directly linked to the preactional phase.

The preactional phase is a very high paced process, where an individual cycles through wishes, hopes, and desires to get to a point of action.

The second dimension of the behavioural process indicates that the initial motivational influences have  progressed  into goal, which ultimately lead to intention and action.

The actional phase is where the energy to have continued motivation comes from that will support the behavioural process.

The final dimension found in the figure of motivational influences is the post actional phase.

Within this phase the goal is evaluated and assessed and further steps will be made to adjust behaviours to achieve goals or the goal will be abandoned.

The principled communicative approach bridges the gap between previous language teaching methods like communicative language teaching and recent research.

Using current research, PCA attempts to extend the communicative approach by focusing on the explicit development of other knowledge areas and skills necessary for efficient communication instead of focusing solely on the systematic components of languages that language teachers traditionally focused on.

The PCA focuses on three main areas including focus on form and form-focused instruction, fluency and automatization and formulaic language.

Each aspect is to ensure meaningful communication with relevant and useful input of both linguistic rules and lexical terms.

Seven Key points for PCA:

1.     The Personal significance principle: The material needs to focus on meaning and it must be classified as significant to the language learner.

An example of this would be having language students fill out a check for an item they would like to buy.

2.     The Controlled Practice Principle: Practice activities should be controlled and promote automatization of skills found in the target language.

Language learners should be given the framework to practice forms and skills of the target language.

3.     Formulaic Language Principle: Selected phrases and practices that are significant to the target language should be intensively practiced and recycled.

Language learners should have a significant amount of opportunities to use specific important phrases of target language.

4.     Language Exposure Principle: Learners should have access to a large amount of target language input to feed the learners implicit learning mechanisms.

Language learners should be exposed to many different inputs that cover the four main categories (reading, writing, speaking, and listening).

5.     The Focused Interaction Principle: Language learners should interact with target language in a genuine context.

Full exposure to language is required for mastery of language.

In 2003 he earned a D.Sc. in Linguistics at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

Between 2008 and 2010 he conducted part-time undergraduate studies in Theology at St John's College, Nottingham.

In 2011 he obtained an MA degree in Theology and Religious Studies at the Department of Theology of the University of Nottingham.

The title of his dissertation was Transfiguration, beauty and biblical interpretation.

In 2017 he received a Ph.D. degree in Theology at the Department of Theology and Religion of Durham University.

The title of his thesis was Progressive creation and the struggles of humankind in the Bible: An experiment in canonical narrative interpretation.