Motivation and SLA

Bridging the gap

Ema Ushioda
University of Warwick

Motivation has been a major research topic within SLA for over four decades,
yet has endured a marginalized position within the field, remaining somewhat
isolated from its more mainstream linguistic traditions. The analysis of motiva-
tion and its role in SLA has largely been at the level of global learning outcomes,
and research has had little to say about how motivational factors relate to the in-
terim processes of linguistic development. Thus while motivation is recognized
as a prerequisite for successful SLA, the relevance of motivation research to
understanding the finer detail of how SLA happens has been unclear. This paper
discusses some studies that have attempted to integrate the analysis of motiva-
tion with more linguistic approaches in SLA. It proposes an agenda for bridging
the gap between motivation and mainstream SLA research, and suggests how
motivation research may contribute to the development of major lines of think-
ing within the field.

Introduction: The gap between L2 motivation research

and mainstream SLA

The starting-point for this paper is the argument that within the field of SLA re-
search, the study of motivation has flourished for over forty years and yet re-
mained somewhat isolated from the more mainstream concerns of the field. This
is a curious state of affairs since motivation is a widely recognized variable of
importance in SLA, and perhaps one of the key factors that distinguishes first
language acquisition from second language acquisition processes. To put it sim-
ply, motivation is not really an issue in the case of infants acquiring their mother
tongue. On the other hand, being motivated or not can make all the difference to
how willingly and successfully people learn other languages later in life. As Pit
Corder (1967: 164) famously wrote: “given motivation, it is inevitable that a hu-
man being will learn a second language if he is exposed to the language data”. Since

EUROSLA Yearbook 10 (2010), 5–20. doi 10.1075/eurosla.10.03ush

issn 1568–1491/e-issn 1569–9749 © John Benjamins Publishing Company
 Ema Ushioda

the 1970s, the history of motivation research in SLA has been a rich and vibrant
one, spearheaded by the pioneering work of Robert Gardner and his colleagues
in Canada (e.g. Gardner 1985; Gardner and Lalonde 1983; Gardner and Lambert
1972), who drew attention to the significant role of attitudinal-motivational­ vari-
ables in second language learning and established motivation as a major research
topic in SLA. Over the past four decades, L2 motivation research has developed
and evolved through different traditions of inquiry, and has generated and con-
tinues to generate a substantial body of theoretical and empirical literature (for a
recent overview, see Dörnyei and Ushioda 2010).
However, within the field of SLA itself, motivation research has endured a
rather odd, marginalized position, remaining somewhat isolated from the more
mainstream cognitive linguistic traditions that prevail. Thus, while textbooks and
handbooks on SLA consistently include reference to motivation as an important
language learner variable, treatment of the topic tends to be self-contained in a
relatively small section. For example, as Dörnyei (2003: 21) points out, Ellis (1994)
devotes fewer than ten pages (out of nearly 700) to discussing motivation in his
book-length survey of SLA research, even though he acknowledges that it is “a key
factor in L2 learning” (p. 508). Similarly, in Doughty and Long’s (2005) Handbook
of Second Language Acquisition spanning some 900 pages, discussion of motiva-
tion is confined to around ten pages in a chapter on individual differences. In
the more recent second edition of Ellis’s book-length survey of SLA published in
2008 (now spanning over 1000 pages), motivation still does not merit a chapter
in itself but is largely confined to a 15-page section within an 80-page chapter on
individual learner differences. Moreover, in contextualizing his survey of motiva-
tion research, Ellis explicitly makes the critical observation that “the study of L2
motivation research continues to lie outside mainstream SLA” (p. 690).
In short, while all of us might acknowledge the truth of Corder’s famous
pronouncement about the importance of motivation in SLA, it seems that this
importance does not translate into making the analysis of motivation a central
dimension of SLA research. The analysis of motivation seems to be a concern only
for those who, like myself, are specifically interested in issues of motivation in
SLA, while the degree of interaction between L2 motivation research and the rest
of the SLA field seems on the whole rather minimal. We motivation researchers
do not seem to have much to offer to mainstream SLA, and issues of motivation
feature only rather tangentially in the linguistic and psycholinguistic traditions
that dominate the SLA field. In effect, there is something of a gap between motiva-
tion research and mainstream SLA, and it is the purpose of this paper to explore
(a) why such a gap exists, and (b) what can be done to bridge the gap – that is,
what kinds of research inquiry might be pursued in the area of motivation which
would usefully contribute to the development of major lines of thinking in SLA.
 Motivation and SLA: Bridging the gap 

I will begin by considering the history of motivation research in SLA and

discuss how it has been characterized by a lack of interaction with the central
preoccupations of the SLA field.

Why is there a gap? History of motivation research in SLA

The social psychological tradition

I referred earlier to the pioneering work of Gardner, Lambert and their Canadian
colleagues in the 1970s and 1980s, which effectively established motivation as a
major research area in SLA. Their work was pioneering in that it highlighted the
role of affective factors – attitudes and motivation – as significant causes of vari-
ability in second language learning success, which are independent of cognitive
factors such as intelligence or language aptitude. Furthermore, they focused atten-
tion on the inherent social psychological dimension of motivation in SLA, which
distinguishes it from motivation in other domains of learning since, as Gardner
and Lambert (1972: 135) put it, language learners must be “willing to identify
with members of another ethnolinguistic group and to take on very subtle aspects
of their behavior, including their distinctive style of speech and their language”.
From this social psychological process of identification was born the well-known
concept of integrative motivation.
In relation to my argument about the gap between motivation research and
mainstream SLA, it is worth making two key points about the work of Gardner
and his colleagues. Firstly, it initiated and fostered an empirical focus on causal
relationships between motivation and successful L2 learning. It is worth remind-
ing ourselves of the original research question that launched Gardner and Lambert
on their empirical quest: “How is it that some people can learn a second or foreign
language so easily and do so well while others, given what seem to be the same op-
portunities to learn, find it almost impossible?” (1972: 130). This focus on success
in L2 learning as the dependent variable has meant that the analysis of motivation
and its role in SLA has largely been at the level of global learning outcomes or mea-
sures of proficiency. Of course, over the years the research tradition established by
Gardner has been characterized by increasingly sophisticated statistical techniques
to examine and verify the causal relations between attitudinal-motivational vari-
ables and language learning outcomes (e.g. Gardner 1985; Masgoret and Gardner
2003). Nevertheless, the fact remains that the empirical focus is on rather broad
learning outcomes such as general proficiency measures or course grades, or on
behavioural outcomes such as persistence in learning (e.g. Ramage 1990), and not
on interim processes of linguistic development. This is the first point to be made.
 Ema Ushioda

However, the second point to be made about the work of Gardner and his
colleagues is that it influenced the development of associated social psychological
theories of second language acquisition and communication in situations of inter-
group contact in multilingual settings. Such social psychological theories include,
for example, the early work of Schumann (1978) on acculturation theory and
linguistic fossilization, the work of Meisel (1977) on elaborative versus restric-
tive linguistic simplification in the speech of immigrant workers, and the work
of Giles and Byrne (1982) on intergroup relations and linguistic accommodation.
While the construct of motivation is not the primary focus in these associated so-
cial psychological perspectives on SLA, this important body of work does clearly
point to a more fine-grained analysis of how attitudinal-motivational­ factors asso-
ciated with ethnolinguistic identity and social identification may shape processes
of linguistic development or non-development, and help explain the extent to
which particular target-like features of the majority language are acquired or not.
However, this more linguistically-focused angle of inquiry has not been a central
preoccupation of motivation researchers in SLA, for whom the rather broader
focus on global learning, achievement and behavioural outcomes has tended to
prevail. I will come back to this point about issues of motivation, identity and lin-
guistic development later when I discuss ways forward to bridge the gap between
motivation research and mainstream SLA.

From social psychological to cognitive/educational perspectives

By the early 1990s, there was a sense that the social psychological analysis of L2
motivation had somehow run its course and that alternative perspectives were
needed, particularly focusing more on pedagogical issues of how to motivate stu-
dents and how to optimize and sustain their motivation (e.g. Crookes and Schmidt
1991). Thus came about a gradual transition towards more situated classroom-fo-
cused analyses of L2 motivation, drawing on cognitive theories of motivation in
educational psychology to complement the social psychological analyses. In terms
of links with mainstream SLA, this transition did bring with it the potential for a
more fine-grained examination of motivation in relation to processes of learning
and linguistic development – that is, what Dörnyei (2002: 138) refers to as a micro
perspective on motivational behaviours during the SLA process, in contrast to the
broad macro perspective on global patterns of motivation and successful SLA in
the social psychological research paradigm.
However, the dominant lines of inquiry in this more classroom-focused
and process-oriented analysis of motivation have tended to revolve around the
following:
 Motivation and SLA: Bridging the gap 

– types of motivation (e.g. intrinsic or extrinsic) and their effects on learning

behaviour (e.g. Noels, Pelletier, Clément and Vallerand 2000; Ushioda 1996);
– factors that influence motivation (e.g. Williams and Burden 1997);
– how motivation can be sustained and regulated through teacher strategies
or self-regulatory strategies (e.g. Dörnyei and Csizér 1998; Dörnyei and
Ottó 1998).
In other words, where SLA processes are concerned, the attention of motivation
researchers has remained largely limited to the fairly vague notion of engage-
ment – that is, how motivation shapes affective engagement or involvement in
learning. However, there has been rather little analysis of what such motivated or
affective engagement in learning might entail, how it might be theorized, or how
it influences cognitive processes of learning and linguistic development.
Of course, I am simplifying and generalizing here. For example, there has
been some interesting research in the area of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation
and deep versus surface approaches to learning in general education (e.g. Marton
and Säljö 1976; Prosser and Trigwell 1998), which has been applied to the analy-
sis of motivation and reading processes in SLA (e.g. Fransson 1984). This line
of research sheds light on what types of motivation may promote optimum ap-
proaches to learning that entail critical analysis of ideas, making connections with
existing knowledge and achieving deeper understanding and long-term retention
of information, as opposed to superficial memorization approaches to learning.
However, perhaps because this line of analysis focuses on how students deal with
information content rather than on how they develop procedural skills, it has not
been a major area of inquiry within motivation research in SLA.
Another area of inquiry that has more potential is the analysis of the relation-
ship between motivation and cognitive processing in SLA, in terms of what might
be called motivational processing during engagement in learning. This perspective
derived from Dörnyei and Ottó’s (1998) process model of L2 motivation, which
elaborated the successive stages of motivation before, during and after engage-
ment in a learning process. These temporal stages are defined as the pre-actional,
actional and post-actional stages of motivation, with each stage shaped by spe-
cific cognitive processes such as goal-setting, decision-making, action control,
monitoring, causal attributions, and evaluation. As Dörnyei (2005: 86) himself
acknowledges, however, the model is difficult to test empirically, since it is not
easy to define and delimit what a learning process is – e.g. a whole course of
study, a course unit, a single lesson, a task, a succession of tasks. One scholar,
­Manolopoulou-Sergi (2004), has attempted to elaborate the process model even
further by delineating the possible function of motivation in relation to the chain
of psycholinguistic mechanisms in the input, central processing and output stages
10 Ema Ushioda

of information processing in SLA. However, this information-processing model

of motivation, like Dörnyei and Ottó’s process model of motivation, remains es-
sentially a descriptive model only, at the level of theoretical speculation, and dif-
ficult to evaluate empirically.
One approach to the empirical problem has been to take task engagement as
the unit of analysis and focus on motivational task processing. This line of research
has been led by Dörnyei (e.g. Dörnyei 2002; Dörnyei and Kormos 2000; Dörnyei
and Tseng 2009; Kormos and Dörnyei 2004), and has focused on oral interaction
tasks. Although the studies have not shown clear relationships between motiva-
tional variables and quality of language performance in the tasks (as reflected in
linguistic accuracy, complexity, lexical richness or discursive content), they have
pointed to strong relationships between motivational variables and quantitative
measures of task engagement (as reflected in number of words and turns produced,
or number of arguments and counter-arguments produced in discussion tasks). In
fact, Dörnyei (2002) reports in one small-scale study that motivational variables
account for 76 percent of the variance in number of words and 81 percent of the
variance in number of turns. As he notes, these are much higher than the correla-
tions usually obtained between motivation and global achievement measures, and
suggest that the analysis of motivation in relation to specific behavioural learning
measures in task engagement and performance may be a more illuminating line of
inquiry. I will come back to this issue of analysing relationships between motiva-
tion and specific learning processes and behaviours later.

From cognitive to sociocultural perspectives

Of course, motivation has traditionally been classified as an affective variable in

SLA, and it might be assumed that one reason why motivation research has re-
mained somewhat outside the central concerns of SLA is because of SLA’s pre-
dominant focus on language learning as a cognitive psycholinguistic process. In
his book on a cognitive approach to language learning, Skehan (1998: 192) briefly
acknowledges the possible relevance of motivation, but the analysis of motivation
and affective factors is not included in this cognitive approach.
However, the affect–cognition divide is somewhat misleading in this regard,
given that the theories and constructs shaping mainstream motivation research as
well as motivation research in SLA belong very much in the cognitive paradigm
of psychology. Since the cognitive revolution in the second half of the 20th cen-
tury, motivation research has focused predominantly on cognitive motivational
processes such as goal-setting, efficacy beliefs, attributions, decision-making,
expectancies, self-perceptions, self-determination; and motivational theorizing
 Motivation and SLA: Bridging the gap 11

generally takes the form of computational models of mental processes and learn-
ing behaviours and outcomes. In short, there is no ontological division between
motivation research on the one hand, and the cognitive orientation that prevails
in mainstream SLA on the other, and the view put forward by Doughty and Long
(2005) that SLA be seen as a branch of cognitive science would not go against the
grain of most motivation research in SLA.
Of course, recent years have seen a major debate in SLA about competing
ontological paradigms, or what Zuengler and Miller (2006) call “the two paral-
lel SLA worlds” of cognitive and sociocultural perspectives, or the positivist and
relativist paradigms. To cut a long story short, there is now a considerable body
of opinion in the SLA field which suggests that we should view language learning
as a sociocultural and sociohistorically situated process, rather than as primarily
a cognitive psycholinguistic process (see, for example, Lafford 2007). A key argu-
ment here is that the traditional SLA focus on decontextualized interior processes
of language learning as distinct from social processes of language use limits our
understanding of how cognitive structures develop and evolve through engage-
ment in social activity. Thus Kramsch (2002), for example, asks how can we sepa-
rate the dancer from the dance, or acquisition from use, the cognitive from the
social, the individual from the environment?
In short, within the field of SLA in recent years, we have witnessed what
Block (2003) has called a “social turn” in second language acquisition, whereby
the traditional cognitive paradigm of SLA research has begun to be influenced
by or some may say challenged by a variety of more interactionist and socio-
contextually­ grounded paradigms of inquiry. These alternative paradigms in-
clude, for example, Vygotskian sociocultural theory (Lantolf and Thorne, 2006),
language socialization (Watson-Gegeo 2004), ecological perspectives (van Lier
2004), sociocognitive theory (Atkinson 2002), poststructuralist perspectives
(Pavlenko 2002), and most recently dynamic systems and complexity theory ap-
proaches (Larsen-Freeman­ and Cameron 2008a).
Remarkably perhaps, despite its origins in social psychology, it is only very re-
cently too that motivation research in SLA is beginning to embrace this social turn,
reflecting the influence of these wider ontological debates in the SLA field, as well
as a general Zeitgeist in mainstream motivational psychology where sociocultural
and situated perspectives integrating motivation and context have begun to break
ground (e.g. Volet and Järvelä 2001; McInerney and Van Etten 2004). As recently
argued (Ushioda 2009), the bulk of motivation research in SLA to date has tended
to focus on motivation as an individual psychological phenomenon, located in the
inner workings of the mind, and has tended to sustain the basic Cartesian dual-
ism between the inner mental world of the individual, and the ­surrounding social
environment. Each learner interprets and reacts to her environment, but remains
12 Ema Ushioda

­essentially distinct from it – as Harré and Gillett (1994: 22) put it, hermetically
sealed in her own individual and self-contained subjectivity. However, current
thinking in motivation research in SLA is tuning in to the wider debates about the
organic relations between individual and context, about emergentism in SLA (Ellis
and Larsen-Freeman 2006), and about dynamic complex systems and non-linear
relations (e.g. Dörnyei 2009a, 2009b; Ushioda 2009).
In short, in terms of my arguments in this paper, the conditions seem right
and the time seems ripe for a much closer synergy between motivation research
and mainstream SLA, given this shared pull towards dynamic and socio-contex-
tually grounded analyses of the processes shaping SLA. Some will argue of course
that the sociocultural paradigm is not (yet?) mainstream SLA, and clearly the
debates are ongoing. Nevertheless, the position taken here is that new directions
in motivation research may contribute to pushing forward and developing major
lines of inquiry in SLA that cut across the sociocultural and cognitive paradigms.
The second part of this paper sketches some possible ways forward in this regard,
by drawing on some recent studies which may illustrate how this closer synergy
between motivation and mainstream SLA research can happen.

Bridging the gap: Towards a research agenda

In sketching this research agenda, I will begin with some perspectives that fall
squarely within the cognitive paradigm, and consider issues of motivation in rela-
tion to specific cognitive and metacognitive processes in SLA. I will then discuss
the shift towards more sociocultural, relational and contextually grounded per-
spectives on motivation and SLA.

Motivation and cognitive processes

Earlier, it was noted that motivation research in SLA has tended to adopt a rather
general perspective on language learning processes and outcomes – typically in
terms of global achievement outcomes or rather vague notions of engagement
or involvement in learning. However, the few studies that have adopted a more
sharply focused lens on specific SLA processes suggest that this is a promising
angle of inquiry. I have already mentioned the work of Dörnyei and his colleagues
in relation to motivational task processing in this regard. By way of further illus-
tration, I will here refer to two studies that focus on features of L2 phonological
development and L2 pragmatic development respectively.
 Motivation and SLA: Bridging the gap 13

The set of studies reported by Segalowitz, Gatbonton and Trofimovich (2009)

continues the social psychological tradition of research that has investigated rela-
tionships between ethnic group identity and second language development in sit-
uations of intergroup contact in multilingual settings. As they explain, a common
finding in this research is that people’s relative degrees of identification with their
primary ethnolinguistic group versus their target language group will influence
the levels of target language proficiency they achieve. Typically, those who have
strong beliefs in the role of language in maintaining the identity of their primary
group will develop lower levels of proficiency in their L2. One possible explana-
tion for this phenomenon is that L2 speakers with a strong sense of affiliation to
their primary ethnolinguistic group may deliberately “hold back” some aspects
of their L2 use, in order to avoid sounding too much like members of a different
ethnolinguistic group. In other words, some people may feel motivated to retain
non-standard speech patterns as a marker of their own ethnolinguistic identity,
rather than accommodate to the target language norm.
However, as Segalowitz et al. (2009) observe, it is unlikely that deliberate non-
accommodation or speech distancing is the only explanation for a link between
ethnolinguistic affiliation and language proficiency. It is unlikely because some L2
speech patterns differ from native-like speech in ways that are far too subtle to re-
flect conscious deliberate attempts to sound non-native-like. A case in point they
analyze in their series of studies is the voiced interdental fricative /ð/ in English,
as acquired by French Canadian speakers, and typically realized in non-standard
form as the voiced alveolar /d/, depending on phonetic environment.
Based on detailed analyses of their data, the researchers speculate that the
link between ethnolinguistic affiliation and L2 proficiency may be mediated by
a combination of motivational and psycholinguistic variables. Specifically, they
suggest that aspects of ethnolinguistic affiliation are psychologically realized
in a person’s motivational self-concepts – that is, the degree to which they see
themselves as wanting to embrace an inclusive double identity as speaker of both
French and English and member of the larger Canadian population; or the degree
to which they hold a more exclusive sense of identity as French Canadian. These
motivational self-perceptions will in turn affect the amount and quality of L2 use
and exposure they will choose to engage in. For example, they may choose to limit
contact with target language speakers. The amount and quality of these L2 experi-
ences will in turn impact on the fine-tuning of the person’s cognitive-perceptual
processing mechanisms in relation to, for example, important phonetic distinc-
tions in the target language. These psycholinguistic variables and constraints will
in turn impact on ultimate skill attainment.
14 Ema Ushioda

In short, Segalowitz et al.’s research provides a good illustration of how the

analysis of motivational variables in relation to specific psycholinguistic processes
and aspects of SLA may prove particularly illuminating.
Another series of studies by Takahashi (2001, 2005) also illustrates the value
of exploring links between motivation and particular aspects of cognitive pro-
cessing in SLA – specifically the cognitive processes of noticing and attention.
The connection between motivation and attention in SLA was first highlighted
by Crookes and Schmidt (1991). Subsequently Schmidt (1993) put forward the
speculation that language learners who are integratively motivated – i.e. moti-
vated by a strong interest in the target language culture and a desire to integrate
into the target language community – are likely to pay particularly close attention
to the pragmatic aspects of L2 input, since pragmatic awareness and competence
would seem an important dimension of successful acculturation.
In her research, Takahashi has systematically investigated how motivation af-
fects language learners’ attention and awareness when processing particular prag-
malinguistic features. Specifically, the target features in her research comprised
request strategies in English. These included complex bi-clausal request forms
(e.g. I was wondering if you could VP…; Is it possible to VP …? If you could VP …),
classified as request head acts; as well as structurally simpler interactional features
for effective floor management (e.g. you know, well, maybe), idiomatic expressions
(e.g. How ya doing?) and non-idiomatic expressions (e.g. I don’t want to bother
you). Participants (who were Japanese college students) were asked to listen to
and study role-play transcripts of native speakers and non-native speakers mak-
ing requests, and then write down and comment on native-speaker expressions
that differed from non-native speaker expressions. Data were also gathered on
participants’ motivation and English proficiency.
The results showed that the complex bi-clausal request forms were much less
likely to be noticed than the other pragmalinguistic features, and that more atten-
tion was paid to interactional features (such as you know, well, maybe). Takahashi
speculates that participants may believe that they have already mastered L2 re-
quest realization with mono-clausal request forms, and so fail to notice the more
complex bi-clausal forms. However, a subset of participants who were classified as
strongly intrinsically motivated to learn English were found to be more attentive
to bi-clausal request forms, as well as idiomatic expressions. Takahashi suggests
that intrinsically motivated learners are greatly interested in learning the language
and enjoy activities that enable them to develop their communication skills. They
may perceive pragmalinguistic forms as ones that will help them to achieve their
English communication goals successfully, and so pay greater attention to these
features. Interestingly, no significant relationships were found between proficien-
cy and pragmalinguistic awareness, suggesting that it is motivation rather than
proficiency which directs learners attention to pragmatic input.
 Motivation and SLA: Bridging the gap 15

Takahashi’s research is illuminating, and paves the way for further research
on motivation and L2 pragmatic development, as well the analysis of whether
motivation may promote selective attention to different aspects of L2 input.

Motivation and metacognition

Another area where the analysis of motivation also seems relevant is in relation
to metacognition. There have been quite a few studies that have investigated rela-
tionships between motivation and use of metacognitive strategies – e.g. MacIntyre
and Noels 1996; Schmidt and Watanabe 2001; Vandergrift 2005. Generally speak-
ing, however, this research has tended to rely on self-report data to assess strategy
use or metacognitive awareness, and has tended to adopt a quantitative perspec-
tive on amount, range or frequency of strategy use in relation to motivation. It is
argued here that this kind of research inquiry offers a rather limited analysis of
how motivation may interact with metacognition in SLA, since it can shed little
light on how motivation shapes the development of metacognitive skills. From a
theoretical point of view, motivation and metacognition are highly interrelated,
since the exercise of metacognition can occur only when the ability to control
strategic thinking processes is accompanied by the motivation or will to do so.
In the literature on metacognition and self-regulated learning, the relevant catch-
phrase here is what McCombs and Marzano (1990) call “will and skill”.
As SLA researchers, if our interest is in how metacognition develops and
how this interacts with motivation, I think a fruitful angle of analysis may be a
­Vygotskian sociocultural one. According to sociocultural theory (Vygotsky 1978;
Lantolf and Thorne 2006), the goal of all learning is self-regulation, where self-
regulation is understood to mean independent strategic functioning and meta-
cognitive control in relation to a particular type of task. A central principle of
Vygotsky’s theory is that the origins of self-regulation are social and dialogic,
realized in the processes of task-focused interaction through which the teacher
scaffolds the learners' attempts to accomplish the goal. The purpose of scaffolding
is not simply to have the learner complete the task but to promote a capacity to
think strategically and thus to gain control, or self-regulation, of strategic mental
processes. Research evidence suggests that the explicit transfer of the agentic reg-
ulatory role to the learner is critical in this dialogue (e.g. Diaz, Neal and ­Amaya-
Williams 1990), so that the learner is motivated to do the thinking instead of
simply responding passively to directives. Clearly, the research programme I am
suggesting here would thus entail the microgenetic analysis of how motivational
and metacognitive processes may develop through task-focused interaction.
16 Ema Ushioda

Motivation, context, agency and dynamic complex systems

This brings us of course to the question of broadening the research agenda be-
yond the traditional cognitive paradigm to consider the dynamic interactions in-
tegrating persons and social context in the analysis of motivation and SLA. As I
mentioned earlier, motivation theory in educational psychology as well as SLA
has been slow to adopt contextual paradigms of inquiry. In the computational
models of motivation that have characterized the cognitive paradigm, context is
conceptualized merely as an independent background variable or set of external
factors which may influence motivation. However, contemporary situative per-
spectives on motivation challenge researchers to integrate notions of self-as-agent
and context in a dynamic and holistic way, and to explore how motivation devel-
ops and emerges through the complex interactions between agent and context
(Volet and Järvelä 2001). Moreover, the relationship between agent and context is
a reciprocal and mutually constitutive one, since the self-as-agent is an inherent
part of the developing context and contributes to shaping that context.
Thus, in a recent paper (Ushioda 2009), I have put forward the case for what
I call a “person-in-context relational view” of second language motivation, where
the unit of analysis is person-in-context, rather than language learner or individual
difference in an abstract theoretical sense. In an inherently social process such
as language acquisition, the person cannot be meaningfully separated from the
social environment within which he/she operates, and so the challenge is to adopt
a dynamic perspective that allows us to consider simultaneously the ongoing mul-
tiple influences between environmental and individual factors, in all their com-
ponential complexity, as well as the emerging changes in both the person and the
environment (see Dörnyei 2009b).
Of course, it is clear that the focus of discussion here is not just on moti-
vation but the whole process of SLA, as currently articulated in discussions of
‘emergentism’ (Ellis and Larsen-Freeman 2006), and dynamic systems and com-
plexity theory approaches to SLA (Larsen-Freeman and Cameron 2008a). These
approaches concern the behaviour of complex systems that contain multiple in-
terconnected components, where development is characterized by non-linear
growth as systems adapt and evolve organically in response to contextual pro-
cesses, and in ways that contribute to shaping context. As Dörnyei (2009a, 2009b)
argues, this dynamic systems perspective on SLA processes renders the notion
of discrete individual difference variables (such as motivation) rather meaning-
less, since processes of motivation, cognition and emotion and their constituent
components continuously interact with one another and the developing context,
thereby changing and causing change in non-linear and unpredictable ways, as
the system as a whole restructures, adapts and evolves.
 Motivation and SLA: Bridging the gap 17

In short, once we view motivation as an integral part of this evolving organic

and adaptive system of cognitive, affective and contextual processes shaping SLA,
it is clear that the analysis of motivation will no longer be separated from the
primary concerns of SLA research. Moreover, it seems likely that the analysis of
motivation may play a major role in any dynamic systems perspective on SLA,
given the need to consider the processes of human agency, intentionality and re-
flexivity that are fundamental to the dynamic interactions between self and con-
text (Sealey and Carter 2004).

Concluding note

This paper set out to outline how motivation research may be better integrated
into mainstream SLA, and contribute to the development of major lines of think-
ing in the field. However, it is beyond the scope of the paper to elaborate pos-
sible research designs and methodologies in this regard. The dynamic systems
and complexity theory approach to SLA is still new and untried, and presents
significant challenges in terms of developing workable research designs and ana-
lytical tools to investigate complex systems in a coherent and systematic way (see,
for example, Larsen-Freeman and Cameron 2008b). But, to adapt that famous
pronouncement by Corder cited at the beginning of this paper, perhaps, given
motivation, it is inevitable that we SLA researchers will find a way forward.

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