Motivation and good language learners

Abstract

It almost goes without saying that good language learners are motivated. Common sense and everyday experience suggest that the high achievers of this world have motivation, a word which derives from the Latin verb movere meaning to move. Thus, simply defined, we might say that motivation concerns what moves a person to make certain choices, to engage in action, and to persist in action. The need for personal motivation is a message that resonates across so many stories of major and minor human endeavor, whether in the single-minded dedication of an athlete pursuing an Olympic dream, the drive and ambition of a young executive aiming for the top of the corporate ladder, or the willpower and self-discipline of someone determined to lose weight or to give up smoking. Without motivation, success will be hard to come by, and the case of learning a second or foreign language is little different. Motivation is listed by Rubin (1975) among the three essential variables on which good language learning depends. As Corder (1967, p. 164) famously put it forty years ago, “Let us say that, given motivation , it is inevitable that a human being will learn a second language if he is exposed to the language data.” Yet however commonsensical this general observation might be, the pursuit of its empirical verification has exercised language acquisition scholars for decades and generated an enormous amount of research.

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