Zoltan Dornyei

Zoltan Dornyei (1960-2022) was a Hungarian applied linguist whose research on motivation in second-language learning became a standard reference in language-education pedagogy and teacher training. A professor of psycholinguistics at the University of Nottingham, he began his academic career at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest before moving to the United Kingdom in 1998. His work developed practical, classroom-facing models of learner motivation, including the L2 Motivational Self System, which explains language learners' effort in terms of the gap between their current self-image and an imagined future self who speaks the target language fluently, and offered teachers strategies for building and sustaining that motivation across a course of study. He also wrote widely used guides to research methods in applied linguistics and to designing motivational classroom strategies, shaping how language teacher-education programs approach motivation, individual differences and classroom practice in second-language instruction.