In this article I would like to look briefly at the background to the concept of enthusiasm, its evolution from earlier understandings in the domain of religion to its modern understandings as expressed by various lexicographic sources. This will lead me to the major focus of the article, which is the various applications of enthusiasm in education. Not surprisingly, there is a large body of empirical studies on teacher and learner enthusiasm and its contribution to successful teaching and learning. A selection of studies is presented here and their results are discussed. The empirical part of this article looks at my own qualitative study of pre-service EFL teachers’ narratives and their perceptions of teacher enthusiasm and its impact on teaching and learning success, as seen from their own perspective. In the concluding part I suggest how teacher training should incorporate ideas on teacher enthusiasm and strategies to deploy them as prospective weapons in preventing professional burnout in teachers. As Churchill said, “success is not final... Failure is not fatal... it´s the courage to continue that counts.” I strongly believe that it is enthusiasm that gives us courage to continue.
The present issue consists of articles in various areas of SLA and also research in multilingualism. The thematic spread starts with the text related to the sociolinguistic variable of age: "The Age Factor in the Foreign Language Class: What Do Learners Think?" by Simone E. Pfenninger and David Singleton, followed by a study of non-native speaker e-mail communication (Jan Pikhart) and another paper addressing a sociolinguistic variable: "Do Girls Have All the Fun? Anxiety and Enjoyment in the Foreign Language Classroom by Jean-Marc Dewaele et al. The second group of articles begins with the text addressing the issues of multilingualism: "Multilingual Processing Phenomena in Learners of Portuguese as a Third or Additional Language" by Teresa M. Włosowicz, followed by a study of code-switching practices among immigrants in the UK by Katarzyna Ożańska-Ponikwia. The final paper by Beata Grymska represents a more theoretically-oriented perspective delving into the theoretical conceptualizations of language aptitude.