Teaching and Researching Motivation

Zoltán Dörnyei, Ema Ushioda

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781351006729
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Englisch

Cultivating motivation is crucial to a language learner's success – and therefore crucial for the language teacher and researcher to understand. The third edition of Teaching and Researching Motivation reflects the dramatic changes in the field of motivation research. With an increased emphasis on dynamic perspectives on motivation and its relations with other individual, social and contextual factors, this book offers ways in which advances in the field can be put to practical use in the classroom and in research.

Key new features and material:

• exploration of the motivation to learn languages other than English (LOTEs);
• principles for designing L2 motivational studies;
• discussion of emerging areas of research, including unconscious motivation and language learning mindsets.

Providing a clear and comprehensive theory-driven account of motivation, Teaching and Researching Motivation examines how theoretical insights can be used in everyday teaching practice. The final section provides a range of useful resources, including relevant websites, key reference works and an online repository of tools and instruments for researching language learning motivation. Fully revised by pre-eminent researchers in this field, Zoltán Dörnyei and Ema Ushioda, this is an invaluable resource for teachers and researchers alike.

Part I

What is Motivation?

1 Exploring Motivation

Changing Perspectives

This chapter will…

• describe the complex meaning of the term “motivation”;
• summarise key challenges in theorising motivation;
• outline current perspectives in understanding L2 motivation.

The word “motivation” derives from the Latin verb movere meaning “to move”. What moves a person to make certain choices, to engage in action, to expend effort and persist in action – such basic questions lie at the heart of motivation theory and research. Remarkably, however, these deceptively simple questions have generated a wealth of theory and research over the decades, provoked considerable debate and disagreement among scholars, spawned numerous theoretical models encompassing different variables and different understandings of the construct of motivation, and produced few clear and straightforward answers. While intuitively we may know what we mean by the term “motivation”, there seems little consensus on its conceptual range of reference. In fact, according to Walker and Symons (1997), there was a point when the American Psychological Association considered replacing the word “motivation” as a search term in its main psychological database, Psychological Abstracts, because, as a concept, it had too much meaning and therefore was not very useful.

1.1 The Complexity of Motivation

What has prevented a consensus in our understanding of motivation? Perhaps a helpful analogy to draw here is with the well-known Indian fable of the blind men encountering an elephant, each touching a different part of the animal (tusk, tail, ear, trunk, belly) and ending up with a very different mental representation of the animal. Similarly, when it comes to understanding motivation, researchers are inevitably selective in their focus since it seems impossible to capture the whole spectrum of internal and external influences, and of conscious and unconscious factors, that may motivate human behaviour. Therefore, let us state as a preliminary that no existing motivation theory to date has managed – or even attempted – to offer a comprehensive and integrative account of all the main types of possible motives for human behaviour, and it may well be the case that elaborating an eclectic “supertheory” of motivation will always remain an unrealistic aim. After all, motivation theories intend to explain nothing less than why humans think and behave as they do, and it is very doubtful that the complexity of this issue can be accounted for by a single comprehensive theory. Let us begin our exploration by briefly considering this complexity from a number of perspectives.

Concept 1.1 The Meaning of the Term “Motivation”

Perhaps the only thing about motivation most researchers would agree on is that it, by definition, concerns the direction and magnitude of human behaviour; that is,

• the choice of a particular action;
• the persistence with it;
• the effort expended on it.

In other words, motivation is responsible for

• why people decide to do something;
• how long they are willing to sustain the activity;
• how hard they are going to pursue it.

1.1.1 The Different Senses of Motivation, and the Challenge of Time

Even in common parlance, the term “motivation” can be used in several different senses, suggesting something of its complexity as a phenomenon. Motivation can mean a person’s reasons or purposes for doing something, such as when actors read a script and ask themselves “What’s my motivation?” as they try to get into character. The term can also be used to describe a gradable state, such as feeling very motivated or only slightly motivated, and it can even describe a fluctuating process over time, such as experiencing motivational highs and lows. Motivation can also refer to more stable dispositional characteristics that we recognise in people, such as when we describe a person as motivated and driven. Motivation can furthermore characterise the properties of phenomena we experience, such as when we describe a task or an event as motivating or demotivating, while in its transitive verb form it can characterise purposeful actions we take to motivate others or to motivate ourselves through, for example, motivational speeches or self-motivational strategies.

Given this complexity, it is perhaps not surprising that researchers have tended to pay rather selective attention to the different senses of motivation. Within mainstream psychology, the principal attention has been on motivation as a dispositional trait or “individual difference” (ID) characteristic. This approach is anchored in a long tradition of ID research or trait psychology that examines how individuals show consistency of behaviour across time and contexts while differing from other individuals in their trait dimensions and associated behavioural tendencies (for a brief history of ID research, see Dörnyei & Ryan, 2015). With regard to motivation as an ID characteristic, the approach has led to a primary focus on classifying the types of reasons, goals or purposes that people have for pursuing a course of action, and on examining performance outcomes, such as levels of achievement or success (e.g. expectancy–value frameworks, Rosenzweig, Wigfield & Eccles, 2019; or theories of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, Ryan & Deci, 2017; see Sections 2.1.1 and 2.1.2). Attention has also been focused on the effects of performance outcomes on subsequent motivation, as reflected in, for example, approach versus avoidance tendencies (Eder, Elliot & Harmon-Jones, 2013) or learned helplessness (Peterson, Maier & Seligman, 1993). This division of attention reflects a history of debate within the educational field as to whether motivation is primarily a “cause” or an “effect” of learning, with the general consensus being that it functions in a cyclical relationship with learning. This is theorised in terms of positive cycles of high motivation and achievement, and negative cycles of low motivation and achievement, with much research attention focusing on how negative cycles can be broken by modifying the cognitive processes (e.g. attributions, mindsets) that mediate the relationship between motivation and learning (e.g. Dweck, 2006, 2017).

However, most people’s experience of motivation in real life is rather more complex than simply perceiving cause-and-effect binary states before and after a task or an event. Motivation to do something usually develops gradually, through a complex mental process that involves initial planning and goal setting, intention formation, task generation, action implementation, action control and outcome evaluation. These different subphases may be associated with different motivational processes. Ignoring “time” can (and often does) result in a situation when two theories are equally valid and yet contradict one another – simply because they refer to different phases of the motivation process. Moreover, in sustained long-term activities such as learning a foreign language, motivation does not remain constant over weeks, months and years, or even during a single lesson. It ebbs and flows in complex ways in response to various internal and external influences. This diachronic aspect of motivation thus complicates attempts to represent the concept in a unified way, since we need to take account of motivational development at the micro-level of moment-by-moment experiences as well as at the macro-level of long-term experience or life history. We shall see in later chapters how current theoretical and empirical approaches are rising to this challenge.

Quote 1.1 Dörnyei and Ottó’s Definition of L2 Motivation

In a general sense, motivation can be defined as the dynamically changing cumulative arousal in a person that initiates, directs, coordinates, amplifies, terminates and evaluates the cognitive and motor processes whereby initial wishes and desires are selected, prioritised, operationalised and (successfully or unsuccessfully) acted out.

Dörnyei & Ottó (1998, p. 65)

1.1.2 The Relationship Between Individual and Context: Evolving Perspectives

Adding to the complexity of theorising motivation is the challenge of accounting for the role of contextual factors and the relationship between individual and context (for a recent discussion in relation to L2 motivation in particular, see Dörnyei, 2020; Yim, Clément & MacIntyre, 2019). In most psychological theories of motivation, the unit of analysis is the individual, and social-contextual factors are viewed as external influences that may have an effect on individual motivation. Thus, for example, in traditional behaviourist accounts, motivation is theorised in terms of observable conditioned responses to environmental stimuli (rewards or punishments), as commonly depicted in the “carrot-and-stick” metaphor of motivation. In subsequent cognitive accounts of motivation that remain very current today, the analytical focus is on how individuals perceive and process the external social environment, and how these internal cognitions then direct their motivation and behaviour. Thus, social-contextual factors are seen as important only in so far as they are filtered through the individual’s perceptions. This makes intuitive sense since it is individuals who initiate actions and the immediate cause of human behaviour is indeed individual motivation.

However, the problem with this individualistic perspective on social context is that it is incomplete. Humans are social beings and human action is always embedded in a range of social, cultural, physical or virtual environments that considerably affect how any individual person may think, feel, act or behave. A contrasting perspective on the relationship between individual and social context focuses instead on broad social processes and macrocontextual factors, such as sociocultural norms and values, intergroup relations, or socio-political ideologies. From this perspective, the individual is seen as a reactive “pawn” whose motivations and attitudes are largely determined by the more powerful forces at large, such as their membership of certain social, ethnic or political groups, as reflected in social identity theory (e.g. Hogg, 2016).

Yet, individuals are also an integral part of the contexts they inhabit and contribute to shaping and changing their environment through their motivated actions and behaviours. This agentic capacity of individuals to act upon and shape their contexts is illustrated on a global and local sc...