A Handbook
In his contribution to the debate about the proliferation of handbooks in The Modern Language Journal, Henry Widdowson (2011) wryly observes that far from being hard to put down, their usual heft makes them hard to pick up. For although the term ‘Handbook’ originally implied that it was a practical guide, light enough to be held in the hand while engaged in some practical task, the modern academic version is usually not so much a guide as a reference work, designed to be a comprehensive and authoritative review of a particular field of scholarship at a particular point in time. In the same debate Susan Gass (2011) points out that handbooks may have a ‘normalizing’ impact on the field, as recognized experts are assembled together to determine what is known, what is not yet known, and what are accepted methods of constructing new knowledge. One reason that handbooks have proliferated in recent times is that knowledge is being created at such an unprecedented pace that publishers believe there is a market for works that effectively summarize the ‘state-of-the-art’, with the target readership including specialists in one area who wish to learn about another area, as well as novice researchers who want to survey the lie of the land before planning their own explorations.
In this volume our goal has been to combine the virtues of a reference work with those of a guidebook. As the first collected volume of ‘state-of-the-art’ chapters in the field, the aim is to present a comprehensive picture of scholarly work in second language (L2) motivation. As editors, putting together Parts I and II was relatively easy; we brainstormed a range of topics in which there seemed to be sufficient weight of writing and research, either in the past or currently, to warrant a handbook-type treatment. We then invited leading experts to write about them. With regard to topic coverage, we feel we have achieved a degree of comprehensiveness. Of course, there may be potentially important topics not covered, for example the motivational impact of language testing and assessment, institutional rewards and punishments, and the relationship between motivation and self-confidence. However, because there is not yet a substantial body of established knowledge to report, we decided they did not merit their own chapter, though they make appearances in others.
So that the handbook could function as a guidebook for current and future scholars in the field, we decided to include a section (Part III) showcasing L2 motivation research in action—that is, chapters which report what is known about L2 motivation in particular global contexts, or among particular types of learner. We also wanted to include a section (Part IV) where chapters focus on aspects of L2 motivation that are only beginning to attract the interest of researchers, and which promise to become fruitful lines of enquiry. Authors were asked not only to summarize existing knowledge and understandings of their topic, but to point readers towards the key questions that still need to be addressed and, where appropriate, advise on methods of investigation. The final chapter, by Ema Ushioda, deals directly with research methods in L2 motivation, describing how they have evolved over the past few decades and the direction they may, or should, take in the future.
Of Motivation
Motivation is wanting. It is a condition of an organism that includes a subjective sense (not necessarily conscious) of desiring some change in self and/or environment. Presumably this includes some predisposition to act in ways that will facilitate that change. (Baumeister, 2016, pp. 1–2)
An integral part of being human, motivation has been an important and valued strand of psychological science since the 1930s, as modern societies—governments and businesses—sought to understand what people wanted, why they wanted those things and, more cynically, how those wants could be manipulated. It gained renewed impetus in the late twentieth century from the cognitive revolution, which generated a host of goal-related theories, and more recently from a revival of interest in more fundamental motives like need satisfaction and threat avoidance. This prodigious academic enterprise is recognized in the compilation of several authoritative handbooks on motivational theory (e.g., Eliot, 2008; Elliot, Dweck, & Yeager, 2017; Ryan, 2012) as well as at least two on educational applications (Christenson, Reschly, & Wylie, 2012; Wentzel & Wigfield, 2009).
This handbook is the first to cover a sub-field of those educational applications; as far as we are aware, there is as yet no handbook of motivation for mathematics learning, science learning, or for that matter on teacher motivation. It is therefore worth asking why language learning motivation has generated a degree of scholarly attention, research and writing such as to warrant publication of a handbook. We think there are at least three reasons.
First, as Stephen Ryan describes in his chapter (also see Dörnyei & Ushioda, 2011), for better or worse, the field of L2 motivation has to a large degree evolved independently of mainstream motivational psychology, developing its own unique constructs that appear to be especially relevant to understanding why people want to learn, or do not want to learn, another language. The ‘ideal L2 self’, for instance (see Kata Csizér’s chapter), has no equivalent in other fields of education, yet has struck an immediate chord with many educators working in teaching environments around the world where English is not just a subject on the school curriculum but a passport to personal advancement, and where “the constant reinvention of selves […] seems to be part and parcel of being a good citizen” (Block, 2018, p. 452). In fact, the close relationship between language and identity is a vivid thread running through the story of L2 motivation since its inception in 1950s Canada (see the chapter by Robert Gardner) and long predates the mainstreaming of identity-based motivation (Kaplan & Flum, 2009). So although the field has, to its great benefit, borrowed liberally from mainstream psychology in recent years, scholars have a sense of working within an identifiable sub-discipline with its own history, accomplishments and community.
Another reason relates to the sheer quantity of language learning and teaching that is going on around the world, some of it very high stakes and some of it not. Put simply, there are a lot of people wanting, or needing, to learn new languages. As The Douglas Fir Group observe (2016, p. 19), “[t]he phenomenon of multilingualism is as old as humanity, but multilingualism has been catapulted to a new world order in the 21st century”. Globalization, advances in communication technology and increasing geographical mobility have brought languages into contact on an unprecedented scale, confronting people with the challenge of learning other languages, and teachers and institutions with the challenge of facilitating and encouraging that learning. Above all, globalization has promoted (and is promoted by) the spread of English, spawning a vast industry of ELT publishers, exam boards and private language schools, alongside higher education institutions which educate pre- and in-service English teachers, conduct research and produce academic publications. This intense intellectual energy has been channeled into the broad academic fields of Applied Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition, in which L2 motivation studies traditionally sit. The prominence of these domains is witnessed by the proportionally larger number of Q1-ranked journals related to language learning (SJR, 2019), as compared to other areas of education. Yet, within these larger academic fields, L2 motivation seems to be particularly flourishing; Boo, Dörnyei, & Ryan (2015) count 416 pieces of work published in major journals or edited anthologies between 2005 and 2014, in what they describe as an “extraordinary surge” (p. 145) of academic interest. What is it about language learning that has demanded the attention of so many motivation scholars?
For Language Learning
The third reason for the existence of this handbook could be that learners of languages face unique challenges to their motivation. Making progress in most curriculum subjects demands incremental steps forward in building knowledge and developing conceptual understanding; the syllabus lays out what is to be learned each term, and an assiduous learner with a capable teacher can reasonably expect to be rewarded for their efforts by satisfactory exam results. In the era of communicative language teaching, language development is no longer conceived solely in terms of accumulating knowledge of structures, rules and lexis. Rather, language development involves acquiring a set of competences. It involves the deployment of the four skills, with their own sub-skills and strategies, which in turn rely on the acquisition of pragmatic, sociolinguistic, textual, and grammatical knowledge that is difficult for teachers to convey even when linguists have managed to accurately describe it. Of course, progress in other academic subjects also involves acquiring thinking and communicative skills, but many of these can be practised relatively easily, with skilful instruction, in a classroom. Language skills, by contrast, need extensive practice in communicative contexts of use, for which monolingual classrooms are often poor substitutes. The result is that even for highly achievement-oriented, goal-driven language learners, progress can be frustratingly slow, and can easily lead to a downward spiral of negative learning experiences, reduced effort and fewer rewards. This has an impact not just on learners but on their teachers, whose own difficulties are channelled back directly and indirectly to educational authorities and training institutes who help to set research agendas. Thus it is that motivation has become a favoured topic of Master’s and Doctoral students in applied linguistics—an audience that this handbook hopes to serve.
While everyone can learn another language, at any stage of the lifespan, the particular language being learned can bring its own motivational challenges. The majority of English language learners in the contemporary world are in Asia (Crystal, 2012), with mother tongues (e.g. Mandarin, Hindi, Japanese) whose spoken and written forms differ greatly from English; the mental effort and personal resilience required to achieve L2 success is considerable, especially when there may be so few opportunities for communicative practice in daily life (to what extent the internet is mitigating these challenges is considered in the chapter by Alastair Henry and Martin Lamb). In other global contexts, learners’ desire for English may be complicated by its association with ‘western’ values, the Christian religion, colonial pasts or contemporary political ideologies (see the chapter by Darvin). Meanwhile in the Anglophone sphere, teachers meet a different kind of motivational problem. Although one well-intentioned research project in the UK came up with 700 reasons to learn a foreign language (Gallagher-Brett, 2004), young people in English-speaking countries struggle to find one when the rest of the world wants to practice English. Evidence shows that the motivational deficit is especially severe among boys and among lower socio-economic groups, and may even reflect recent political developments in the USA and UK (Lanvers, Doughty, & Thompson, 2018; see also the chapter by Ursula L...