Review for Motivation and Foreign Language Learning

2020

2011

Given the fact that teachers are now expected to be informed enough to be able to pilot their teaching towards the varying requirements of different classroom learners, this study is proposed to shed light on what it takes to have (establish and manage) an effective and successful language classroom in terms of learners motivation. This study is designed to investigate the impact of motivation in the context of language learning. To reach the aim of this study, some of the main subjects, topics, and points which can be related to the goal of article are introduced and explained. Afterwards, they are followed by a brief discussion and some beneficial implications and suggestions for the teachers and lecturers.

2015

The present volume, edited by Lasagabaster, Doiz and Sierra, brings together different perspectives on the interrelation between motivation and foreign language learning. Following the editors’ introduction, which carefully summarizes the main ideas explored in each chapter—hence my decision not to organize this review in the same way, but rather to focus on a general aspect that has the potential to encompass all of them—the volume is divided into two parts, each of four chapters. Whereas the first part is theoretically oriented, the second comprises individual studies. The volume ends with the editors’ epilogue, in which an attempt is made to present a unified reading of the contributions.

JALT Journal 34 (2) , 2012

1998

As part of a long-term project aimed at designing classroom interventions to motivate language learners, we have searched for a motivation model that could serve as a theoretical basis for the methodological applications. We have found that none of the existing models we considered were entirely adequate for our purpose for three reasons: (1) they did not provide a sufficiently comprehensive and detailed summary of all the relevant motivational influences on classroom behaviour; (2) they tended to focus on how and why people choose certain courses of action, while ignoring or playing down the importance of motivational sources of executing goaldirected behaviour; and (3) they did not do justice to the fact that motivation is not static but dynamically evolving and changing in time, making it necessary for motivation constructs to contain a featured temporal axis. Consequently, partly inspired by Heckhausen and Kuhl's 'Action Control Theory', we have developed a new 'Process Model of L2 Motivation', which is intended both to account for the dynamics of motivational change in time and to synthesise many of the most important motivational conceptualisations to date. In this paper we describe the main components of this model, also listing a number of its limitations which need to be resolved in future research.