Motivation: L2 Learning as a Special Case?

Abstract

Among the psychological constructs implicated in L2 learning, none has perhaps generated as much literature as motivation. As a field of inquiry, the study of L2 motivation has a rich history dating back some 50 years to early work on individual differences in language learning. As Ellis (2008, p. xix) notes, this work pre-dates the establishment of mainstream second language acquisition (SLA) research in the 1960s. Motivation is widely recognized as a variable of importance in the L2 learning process, and possibly one of the key factors that distinguishes first language acquisition from SLA. Put simply, while motivation is not really an issue in the case of infants acquiring their mother tongue, being motivated or not can make all the difference to how willingly and successfully people learn other languages later in life (Ushioda, 2010, p. 5). Yet we might qualify this observation by noting that motivation is similarly critical to all forms of conscious and intentional human learning, and that it has been a major pedagogical and research issue across the field of education. In this respect, we might ask whether L2 learning represents a special case in the psychology of learning motivation, giving rise to distinctive motivation theories and concepts specific to this domain of learning; or whether L2 motivation can broadly be explained in terms of general theories of learning motivation. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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