What Motivates People to Learn a Foreign Language? Lessons From Language Science Research

If you’ve ever tried to learn a foreign language, what got you started? Maybe you had to take a language in middle or high school, or wanted to communicate with family members who speak another language. Maybe you started learning just for fun, to understand the lyrics to your favorite song, or to watch something on your favorite streaming service in its original language. Discovering what motivates people to start and continue learning new languages, as well as why they sometimes decide to stop, is an important part of language acquisition research. Understanding how language learners and their teachers can develop and sustain language learning motivation over the course of their learning journeys can potentially help increase learners’ success. In this article, we summarize some findings from the field of learner motivation and share some of the insights gained from this line of research. We hope this article will not only be informative, but also thought provoking: consider it an invitation to reflect on your own motivation and language learning experience.

Here are some examples of the research questions that you might encounter in the field of language learner motivation:

· How can teachers motivate their students to learn a language?
· Does increasing students’ motivation lead students to speak the language more?
· Is there a relationship between higher levels of motivation and a decision to continue learning a language?

To investigate these and similar questions, motivation researchers draw heavily from related research in psychology, which has a long tradition of studying motivation in a range of domains beyond language. One useful concept is the notion of internal versus external motivation. As the name suggests, internal motivation stems from a self-driven belief that one’s actions can significantly affect outcomes. Conversely, external motivation stems from the belief that outside factors such as luck or chance are the driving force behind outcomes. Research has shown that, in second language learning, being internally motivated can be very helpful: People who are more internally motivated to learn a language also tend to be more persistent and successful in achieving their goals [1].

Possible selves, or the ways people think about who they do and do not want to be in the future, is another helpful concept in motivation research. People construct possible selves based on their hopes, fears, desires, or goals [2]. Possible selves can be powerful motivators: When people align their actions with the image of the person they want to become in the future, they are better able to achieve their language learning goals. For example, a person who envisions themself living abroad and speaking a foreign language with friends and colleagues becomes motivated by this vision to act in ways that will help them to achieve their goals. This is a very positive vision which has a positive impact on learning, but research has shown that fear of a negative possible self may also impact learning positively. For example, someone who can envision themself not being able to graduate due to a missing language requirement will take steps to avoid that negative outcome.

Researchers have extended the idea of possible selves to develop the concepts of the Ideal Self and the Ought-To Self. The Ideal Self consists of a learner’s future-oriented, idealized vision of themselves as a user of the target language. On the other hand, the Ought-To-Self constitutes a language learner’s drive to avoid negative outcomes and to attend to external motivations [3]. These concepts help researchers go beyond the idea that a learner is either motivated or not, and allow them to delve more deeply into learners’ complex and multifaceted learning motivations. Viewed in this way, we can also start to see ways in which the multidimensional nature of language learner motivation might be leveraged to support language learning.

The ability to visualize a clear, vivid image of oneself as a competent second language speaker has been tied to many positive language learning behaviors and outcomes. Students with a clear image of their Ideal Self have been shown to display more motivated behaviors [4], [5]. Beyond this, multiple studies [6]–[8] found that students who continue to learn their language are more interested in the culture of the people who speak that language [9]. These students also tend to have more positive attitudes towards the language they are learning. In one recent study [10], researchers found that students learning Chinese who had a more developed Ideal Self were more likely to want to continue studying Chinese, which is a strong indicator of motivation.
Researchers have explored some of the ways in which helping language learners to develop their possible selves might impact motivation, and ultimately, language learning itself. One study attempted to enhance the development of students’ possible selves by guiding them through visualization techniques where they imagined themselves achieving their goals. The researchers were interested in whether using visualization techniques and participating in goal-setting activities could help learners develop their possible selves and increase their language learning
motivation. The results showed that visualization and goal setting improved students’ ability to articulate their ideal future self, which then had a positive impact on language learning outcomes [11]. The research suggests that instructors may be able to help students develop their possible selves, which may stimulate language learning motivation.

Being motivated to learn—whether it’s a new language, a sport, an academic field, or useful skill—is immensely helpful in the learning process. We hope to have shown that exploring motivation from a researcher’s perspective gives us unique insights into the nature of language learning. These insights can potentially be leveraged to improve not only our learning motivation, but the quality of our learning itself. By drawing inspiration from domains beyond language research, such as psychology, language motivation researchers have gained valuable insights into motivation in language learning. We think this is an excellent example of research that works across disciplines to make new discoveries, which is very much in the spirit of what we try to do here at Penn State’s Center for Language Science. We hope this brief description of language learning motivation research has provided a glimpse into a unique subfield of language science, and perhaps even a new way of thinking about your own language learning experiences.