New Ways of Looking at Language Learning Motivation

This month we published Contemporary Language Motivation Theory: 60 Years Since Gardner and Lambert (1959) edited by Ali H. Al-Hoorie and Peter D. MacIntyre. In this post the editors explain how the idea for the book came about.

The idea behind this book was born during the second Psychology of Language Learning conference (PLL2) in Jyväskylä, Finland. At the conference, which took place in August 2016, Ali and Peter realized that the 60th anniversary of the seminal paper by Gardner and Lambert (1959) entitled “Motivational variables in second language acquisition” (Canadian Journal of Psychology, 13, 266-272) was on the horizon. That 1959 paper was brief, only seven pages in length, but it is one of the most influential papers in applied linguistics because it helped establish motivation as a valuable subject for study, on par with aptitude.

At the PLL2 conference we were able to approach several potential authors to invite them to join this project. To our delight, we received a favorable response from everyone we spoke with, and they encouraged us to go ahead with the project. People appreciate the impact that Robert Gardner, the Father of second language motivation, has had on our field.

While still at the conference, we also approached Laura at the Multilingual Matters desk to pitch this idea. As always, she offered all necessary assistance and encouragement to speed up the process and complete the paperwork and other preparations. The project was born!

Now, as the physical copy of the book comes into our hands, the project has reached a milestone. We hope that it will inspire new ways of looking at language learning motivation in the Gardner tradition. There seems to be a resurgence of interest in all things motivational just now, so perhaps this is coming at the best possible time to inspire new research with a strong connection to well-established theory, methods, and findings. That Gardner’s contribution to all three areas has been sustained over some 60 years is a notable achievement – worth celebrating, and worth continuing.

We think it is worth carrying on the work of looking at the social psychology of motivation for language learning, and the new book suggests a number of exciting new directions for those studies to take. Maybe we will need a 70th anniversary edition as well.

 

For more information about this book please see our website. 

If you found this interesting, you might also like Motivational Dynamics in Language Learning edited by Zoltán Dörnyei, Peter D. MacIntyre and Alastair Henry.