工科本科生学习二外的动机：混合方法研究

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摘 要

在全球化的大背景下，英语被认为是“全球通用语”，是人们学习第二语言（the second language, L2）的首选。然而，实际上，许多人仍然选择学习除英语之外的第二外语（L3）。尽管现已有大量研究对L2学习动机进行探讨，特别是将英语作为L2的学习，但很少有人关注在中国学习L3的动机。在本文中，作者借鉴了L2的动机理论，并研究了工程学本科生在中国学习英语以外的L3的动机。

本研究采用混合方法（调查和访谈）来探索L3学习者的潜在动机。定量分析数据表明，L3学习动机中，最强的动机是提高语言能力的意图，其次是理想自我的组成部分和内在动机。然而，形成鲜明对比的是，在L3学习者中，工具型动机和应当自我激励都不强烈。后续访谈数据不仅验证了在定量阶段已获得的结果，证明了他们学习的最重要（不重要）的动机，并且解释了现有动机的细小差别。

关键词：第二语言学习动机；第三语言学习动机；动机模型；动机自我系统

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments i

English Abstract ii

Chinese Abstract iii

List of Tables vi

Chapter One Introduction 1

1.1 Background 1

1.2 Significance of the Study 2

1.3 Overview of the Thesis 3

Chapter Two Literature Review 4

2.1 Gardner’s Motivation Model 4

2.2 Dornyei’s L2 Motivational Self System 5

2.3 Wish for Language Proficiency and Intrinsic Motivation 7

2.4 Theoretical Framework and Research Questions 8

Chapter Three Methods 10

3.1 Setting 10

3.2 Quantitative Phase 10

3.2.1 Instrument 10

3.2.2 Participants 11

3.2.3 Procedure 11

3.2.4 Analysis 12

3.3 Qualitative Phase 12

3.3.1 Participants 12

3.3.2 Data Collection and Analysis 13

Chapter Four Findings 14

4.1 Questionnaire 14

4.1.1 Most Prominent Motivational Categories 14

4.1.2 Relations between Six Categories of Motivation 14

4.2 Interviews 16

4.2.1 Interview Results that Verify Quantitative Results 16

4.2.2 New Perspectives Emerged in the Interviews 20

Chapter Five Conclusion 23

References 25

Appendix A. Items used in the questionnaire 28

Appendix B. Interview guide 30

List of Tables

Table 4.1: Descriptive statistics of the variables in the survey 16

Table 4.2 Pearson’s correlation 16

Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Background

Numerous research has already been conducted on the second-language learning motivation (L2^[1]), but L3 learning motivation remains under-researched. As globalization gathers momentum, the role of English as a “lingua franca” has never been so strengthened. Both developed countries such as Sweden, Japan and developing countries such as China are centering their attention on learning English as L2, which contributes to English hegemony to a certain extent (Zhang, 2004). According to Cabau (2009), Sweden has been experiencing the overwhelming effects of English hegemony and English could be considered the second language, in addition to Swedish in the Swedish daily living environment. Similarly, a body of research has emerged on the learning and teaching of English while the research of a third language (L3), which could also be defined as a second foreign language, is still an area in need of attention. Although the dominant position of English as a universal language has somewhat reduced people's interest and motivation in learning L3 (Ge, 2013), there are some students that still gravitate towards the study of a foreign language other than English.

As a “Double First-Class” comprehensive university featuring science and engineering, Southeast University boasts a multitude of engineering students with great global visions. Recent years have witnessed a large number of students learning L3 including Japanese, French, German and Russian in addition to English. The university also offers a range of language courses for the students to choose from. Given that the number of L3 learners are continuously increasing, while their preferences and experiences remain overlooked and under-researched, I design this mixed-method research to explore the motivations underlying their learning of foreign languages other than English.

1.2 Significance of the Study

Most existing studies on foreign language motivation focus on L2. The existing research that does address L3 issues ranges from the impact of L2 English on L3, to factors contributing to L3 study (Yuan, 2010). Henry (2015) contends that the acquisition of L3 is more complicated than that of L2, and there is a dire need of studies on L3 learning motivation (Busse amp; Williams, 2010). An in-depth understanding of L3 learning motivation serves two purposes: to arouse awareness and to provide information as how to accommodate student needs in an English-hegemonic educational context.

In China, English hegemony is evident in both university curricula and students’ personal choices. All Chinese students are obligated to take English courses from junior high through colleges, and the total length of English study could reach 1,600 class hours. At universities, standardized English tests, College English Band 4 and Band 6 are prerequisites for graduation. This leaves little room for foreign languages other than English, although condemning English hegemony and calling for linguistic diversity is the recurrent theme in the current literature on learning and teaching of foreign languages (Zhang, 2004). In such contexts, our students are missing out on many opportunities of acquiring global visions. For instance, science and engineering students do not know the vast body of scholarly literature out there in other languages, or they understand “global” cultures and norms narrowly as what is sanctioned in advanced English-speaking countries. Therefore, by expanding on students’ L3 learning motivation, this thesis arouses awareness of linguistic diversity among students, instructors and policy makers—the importance of foreign languages other than English in our educational system.

In addition, this thesis also discusses how to accommodate the needs of students who are actually learning L3 at our universities. Despite its small size, this body of students is actually steadily growing. How large is this student body to date? What are the students’ preferences and expectations? What goals do they set for themselves and therefore, what curriculum accommodations do they expect the university to provide? The answers to these questions will shed light on the directions and concrete measures of curriculum reforms at our universities. This is the second significance of this thesis.

1.3 Overview of the Thesis

In view of what is mentioned above, my research aims to explore engineering undergraduates’ motivations towards learning L3 other than English at Southeast University.

This thesis includes major four chapters in addition to this first introductory chapter. The second chapter is a detailed review of literature on language learning motivation. Given the scarcity of research on L3 learning motivation, the theoretical framework is based on existing research on L2 learning motivation. Namely, I reviewed Gardner’s (1985), Dörnyei’s (2005), and Busse and Williams’ (2010) framework and built a framework that included six motivational categories: integrative motivation, instrumental motivation, ideal self, ought-to self, wish for language proficiency and intrinsic reasons. This framework guided the survey and interviews of this thesis.

The third chapter introduces the mixed methods adopted in this empirical research. In the first place, questionnaires on six categories of motivations were administered to 108 engineering undergraduates who study L3 at Chinese universities, to investigate their motivational reasons. In the second place, 8 participants were selected from the above sample for in-depth semi-structured interviews to verify and expand on data collected in the first step. The fourth chapter reports on the findings from the two rounds of data collection. In the first quantitative phase, I report on which motivational factor turns out to be the most prominent in L3 learning and how all the motivational factors are related to each other. In the qualitative phase, I report on whether the motivational categories obtained from the first phase are verified or what new categories emerge from the qualitative data. In the last chapter, chapter five, I discuss the educational implications derived from the empirical research.

Chapter Two Literature Review

Motivation of language learning is a concept closely related to learning attitudes and behaviors, which plays a vital role in language study as well as future performance (Gardner, 1985). It also determines whether students can sustain their active engagement over the course of foreign language learning (Williams amp; Burden, 1997).

Given the paucity of studies on L3 learning motivation, I review current theories on L2 learning motivation including Gardner, Tremblay, and Masgoret’s (1997) Motivation Model, Dörnyei’s (2005) L2 Motivational Self System and Busse and Williams’ (2010) findings related to language proficiency and intrinsic reasons, and build a framework to guide the empirical part of thesis.

2.1 Gardner’s Motivation Model

Currently, no consensus on a definition of L2 learning motivation has been reached among researchers. One well-accepted definition from Gardner and Lambert (1972) refers motivation as the interaction between the eagerness to pursue a goal, the efforts associated with it, and the fulfillment gained from the process. Later in 1985, Gardner (1985) explains this definition in a more specific way, by stating that motivation encompasses four basic elements: an aim, an ambition to fulfill the aim, optimistic attitudes towards learning the language, and corresponding devotion to the learning course. Gardner limits motivation to two different types: integrative motivation and instrumental motivation, which are widely used in L2 acquisition literature.

Integrative motivation is concerned with a genuine interest in both the people and the culture of the target language (the L2 students chose to learn). Students driven by integrative reasons tend to establish a rapport with the particular language community in the hope of integrating into the latter’s way of life. Instrumental motivation focuses on people’s pragmatic purposes of learning L2. For instance, people with instrumental orientations choose to learn an L2 so that they could get better chances of promotion in workplaces or land well-paid jobs. In more recent literature, Oxford and Shearin (2011) modify Gardner’s integrative motivation, renaming it “assimilative motivation”, which means L2 language learners are willing to abandon their own culture identity for the purpose of assimilating into the target language society. Despite this modification, the dichotomous structure of Gardner’s L2 learning motivation basically remains intact. In this study, I adopt Gardner’s two categories, integrative reasons and instrumental reasons, as part of my research framework.

2.2 Dornyei’s L2 Motivational Self System

Regarding several opponent voices against Gardner’s motivation model, and drawing on current motivation psychology, Dörnyei (2005) comes up with a new theoretical framework known as L2 Motivational Self System with three dimensions at its core: the ideal L2 self, the ought-to L2 self, and the L2 learning experience. This model offers a new and comprehensive angle to re-conceptualize language-learning motivation in comparison to Gardner’s model.

The ideal self refers to an ideal image that the L2 learner aspires to be in the future (Dörnyei, 2009). For instance, they may vision themselves to be fluent in chatting with international friends and clearly expressing their opinions in the target languages. In addition, they sometimes dream of being intimate with those people as well as their cultures. This ideal self could function as a strong motivator for them to learn L2 without other obligatory duties. In this respect, the ideal self can be seen as similar to Gardner and Lambert (1972)’s integrative motivation to some extent. However, what distinguishes these two categories is that, according to Taguchi, Magid, and Papi’s (2009) comparative research on Chinese, Japanese and Iranian L2 learners’ motivation self-system, the ideal self explains more variance of learner’s motivation compared to integrative reasons. This concept of ideal self also has an edge over the previous motivation psychology on the grounds that it does not necessarily identify with a particular language community. After all, in real life situations, L2 learners could only have little or even no contact with people speaking the targeted language and there is not a clearly defined community for them to integrate into (Busse amp; Williams, 2010).

The ought-to self represents people’s intention to fulfill others’ expectations or to avoid unfavorable outcomes (Dörnyei, 2009). Those L2 learners choose to learn the target languages out of their perceived duties or responsibilities. One possible case is that they struggle to learn extra foreign languages so as to live up to their parents’ expectations and to avoid letting their intimates down. Other circumstances include the requirements of their schooling—they spend abundant time in memorizing basic words of the target languages or they cannot meet the language requirements and wind up graduating without diplomas. The ought-to self in this sense is a close match to the extrinsic motivation supported by Noels (2001), who suggests that in the context of Chinese, Japanese and Iranian language learning environment, students’ motivations always come from parental pressure or curricular requirements.

The L2 learning experience is concerned with learners’ attitudes towards the language in question and can be influenced by specific factors in the learning process such as instructors’ teaching style, and colorful class activities. One point needs to be pinpointed here is that the learning experience is not confined to the immediate learning environment or current learning experience, it can also represent important events in the past which also have bearings on people’s motivations or decisions to learn second languages (Csizér amp; Kormos, 2009). Dornyei (2009) explains, for some L2 learners, their motivation to learn a language does not come from internally or externally generated self-images but rather from successful involvement in the actual language learning process.

These three motivational selves deserve attention because they differ from former motivation concepts. According to Dörnyei (2009), the language ideal and the ought-to selves are more like imagined mental images of learners actually using the targeted languages in the time to come, and these images could constantly change during the learning process as a result of some major learning experience (Henry, 2015), such as instructional styles, classroom activities (Dörnyei, 2009), or even relevant past experiences (Csizér amp; Kormos, 2009). Although there has been a large body of research employing Dornyei’s (2005) Motivational Self System, opinions are divided on which factor is of the most significant in motivating students to learn L2. A plethora of research has centered on the important role of the ideal self (Dörnyei, 2009; Ryan, 2008), and according to the findings of Busse and Williams (2010), the impact of ideal-self ranks the second among all six categories of motivation in their research on German study in English universities, next to a tendency to promote language proficiency. Compared to the well-accepted position of the ideal self, the significance of the ought-to self, however, is not conclusive. For instance, Taguchi, Magid, and Papi (2009) point out that the overall ideal L2 self which motivates students to learn an L2 is considerably less effective than that of the ought-to L2 self. In Chinese, Japanese, and Iranian contexts, expectations from family members as well as the fear of failing language exams become dominate reasons for students to devote to L2 study. While at the other end of the spectrum, ought-to self is rated as the least important motivator for English students studying German as an L2 in Busse and Williams (2010).

With regard to the concept of learning experience, relevant studies are mainly focused on the current learning experience such as teachers’ styles, class activities and peer dynamics. However, compared to ideal-self, and ought-to self, this learning experience category seems to exert little influence on students’ choice of learning foreign languages, especially among college students (Csizér amp; Lukács, 2010). Therefore, I only incorporate two motivational categories, ideal self and ought-to self, into the framework of this thesis.

2.3 Wish for Language Proficiency and Intrinsic Motivation

In addition to the prevalent L2 theories of Gardner (1985) and Dornyei (2005), other two categories of motivation deserve equal attention. These two motivational categories, one is the wish for language proficiency, and the other is intrinsic motivation, are discussed in the exploratory interviews of Busse and Williams’ (2010) study of English students’ motivations of learning German. In their preliminary interviews of L2 learners’ motivation, a wish for language proficiency as well as intrinsic motivation ranked highest among all the motivational concepts, which is contradictory to the primacy of the instrumental motivations as suggested by the European Language Proficiency Survey of university students (Coleman, 1996). Unlike former classifications, the intrinsic motivation refers to a desire to learn a foreign language without external inducement, and it is associated with students’ pure pleasure of language learning (Deci amp; Ryan, 2004). This category well compensates the limited classifications of integrative and instrumental motivation, and offers a new perspective on L2 motivation. Similarly, the wish for language proficiency overrides other traditional motivational categories in Busse and Williams’ (2010) study, and is proven to be the most influential factor in students’ L2 decision-making. Therefore, it is also necessary to include intrinsic motivation and the wish for language proficiency in the current study.

2.4 Theoretical Framework and Research Questions

On the basis of the relevant literature review mentioned above, I employed a questionnaire to investigate the motivational reasons for L3 study. Six general categories were included in the survey: integrative reasons, instrumental reasons, ideal self, ought-to self, wish for language proficiency and intrinsic reasons. The first two categories were chosen mainly because of Gardner’s (1985) classic concepts of integrative and instrumental motivation. Dornyei’s (2005) model of ideal self and ought-to self are also added so as to compensate for the narrow classifications of Gardner’s (1985) motivation model which fails to include various situations where students’ motivation can be defined neither integrative nor instrumental. Other two items are incorporated due to the findings from exploratory interviews of Busse and Williams’ (2010) study of English students’ motivations of learning German. The empirical investigation of this thesis is based on the resulting six categories of motivation. First, concrete items were written to measure the strength of each of the six categories of motivation in the questionnaires. Second, given the limitation and cursory nature of the survey instruments, detailed interview questions were designed, surrounding these six categories, to investigate if participants confirm these categories, or if there are new, or new nuances of meanings to categories. The concrete research questions for the quantitative phase are:

1. Among the six motivational categories, which is the most important motivational category of L3 study?
2. Do these six motivational categories relate to each other, and in what ways are they related to each other?

In the qualitative phase, the concrete research questions are:

1. Do students confirm the six categories of motivation coming up in the quantitative phase?
2. Are there other types of motivation or new nuances of meanings to the existing categories that are not covered in the previous step?

Chapter Three Methods

3.1 Setting

This research employed a mixed-method approach. The university at which the data were collected is a member of the “Double First-Class University” initiative supported by the Chinese government, and it is also one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in the nation. As a comprehensive university featuring first-class engineering education, Southeast university has long devoted to curriculum reform so as to meet students’ increasing needs. In 2018, the office of teaching affairs first opened foreign languages as minor degrees to all students except for language majors. Basically, the university offers four foreign language courses (Russian, French, German, Japanese) in addition to English to these students.

3.2 Quantitative Phase

3.2.1 Instrument

The questionnaire employed in the first quantitative phase was adapted from Busse and Williams’ (2010) questionnaire of L2 motivation, and was made up of two major parts. The first part comprised some demographic information, which included students’ gender, majors, the L3 they chose, and the duration of L3 learning, etc. The second part consisted of six motivational categories which conform to the framework outlined in the Literature Review section: integrative reasons, instrumental reasons, ideal self, ought-to self, wish for language proficiency and intrinsic reasons, and each category was followed by a series of items to measure the strength of learners’ motivation. For instance, under the category of wish for language proficiency, one item was “by studying L3 I hope to gain more competence in speaking L3” (See Appendix A for the questionnaire). Five-point Likert scale was employed to measure the degree of agreement on each item, with 5 indicating the highest level of agreement and 1 indicating the least.

3.2.2 Participants

There were a total of 108 participants, all of whom were engineering undergraduates, and their majors included computer science and engineering, electrical engineering, energy and environment, civil engineering, mechanics, transport engineering, and information science. Fifty-six (52%) participants were male, and 52 (48%) of them were female. They were rather evenly distributed across four years, with 32% (N=35) sophomores, 28% (N=31) juniors, 21% (N=23) freshmen, and 17% (N=19) seniors. This sample of students was randomly drawn from universities across the nation. Thirty-seven percent (N=41) of these participants have studied the L3 more than half, but less than a year. Twenty-eight percent (N=31) of these students have persisted in learning the L3 for more than one year, and only 11% (N=12) of them have stuck to doing this for over 2 years. Regarding the intensity of their L3 learning, eighty-two percent (N=89) of them spent less than 6 hours a week in studying L3. Around 40% (N=41) studied from 2 to 4 hours a week, while 25% of them only devoted less than 2 hours a week to L3 study.

Participants were drawn from two sources. One source was engineering undergraduates who studied L3 at Southeast University (N=33), and given the limited number of participants at our university, I also turned to other engineering undergraduates who studied L3 at other universities in China (N=76) through my personal contacts.

3.2.3 Procedure

In order to approach the target participants, I first contacted the professors who taught the four L3 courses (French, German, Russian, Japanese) at Southeast university, and explained the aims of the survey in detail in the hope of finding appropriate participants who were engineering majors studying L3. Once permission was granted, I was able to collect the contact information of the participants, and sent them the questionnaire through Wenjuanxin, which was an online website focused on releasing questionnaires. Considering the limited number of participants at our own university, I also sent the questionnaires to other potential participants with the help of my friends in other Chinese universities. All the questionnaires were completed within 12 hours, and it took each of them about 12 minutes to fill the questionnaire. The answers were automatically collected through the Wenjuanxin.

3.2.4 Analysis

All the quantitative data were analyzed through the SPSSAU, which was an online website designed for efficient SPSS analysis. The online analytical processes were exactly the same with SPSS version 22.0. Two tests were run so as to tackle the research questions. First, as all the answers were coded according to the Likert scale 5 (strongly agree), 4(agree), 3(undecided), 2(disagree), 1(strongly disagree), I calculated the mean value of all six motivational categories with the purpose of finding out the most influential motivational factor. Secondly, Pearson’s correlation was used to explore if and to what degree, the six categories of motivations are related among themselves.

3.3 Qualitative Phase

3.3.1 Participants

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