Jean-Marc Dewaele is a prominent scholar of multilingualism, who is generally considered the father of research on emotions in bilinguals and language learners[1]. He is currently Emeritus Professor at Birkbeck, University of London.
Life
As a Belgian (b. 1962, Bruges), Dewaele was a French-Dutch bilingual from childhood. He obtained his PhD in 1993 at the Free University of Brussels, writing a thesis on French interlanguage, supervised by Professor Hugo Baetens Beardsmore. He started working at Birkbeck, University of London, in 1994, where he was Professor in Applied Linguistics and Multilingualism from 2010 to 2023.
Work
Dewaele is generally acknowledged as the most influential scholar of emotions in language learners and multilinguals[1]. He started investigating the topic in the early 2000s. Together with Aneta Pavlenko, he played a major role in bringing this issue to the attention of second language and bilingualism researchers twenty years ago.[2] He has published about 350 publications,[3] including the monograph Emotions in multiple languages.[4] He also played an important role in moving research from a focus on negative emotions (mostly anxiety) to a more balanced approach that includes also positive emotions (mostly Foreign Language Enjoyment, for which he co-developed a successful measurement scale[5]). He also produced influential work on language and emotions in psychotherapy. He put the topic on the map for academic researchers, as this had been an understudied topic. Psychotherapists also benefit from his work, particularly the training materials he developed with Dr Beverly Costa, a psychotherapist by profession[6].
Recognition
As of 2024, according to Google Scholar, Dewaele's work has been cited over 30,000 times, and Elsevier ranks him third worldwide in Languages and Linguistics for number of citations[7]. He received numerous awards, such as the Distinguished Scholar Award from the European Second Language Association (2022) and the Equality and Diversity Research Award from the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (2013, with Beverly Costa). He was president of the European Second Language Association and the International Association of Multilingualism, and General Editor of the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. He is General Editor of the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development.