Profiling Chinese university students’ motivation to learn multiple languages

ABSTRACT

This study extends our understanding of Chinese university students’ motivation to learn languages other than English (LOTEs) by adding a contextual dimension to the L2 Motivational Self System. The study drew on Higgins’ ([1987]. “Self-discrepancy: A Theory Relating Self and Affect.” Psychological Review 94: 319–340.) original Own-Other standpoints and Lanvers’ ([2016]. “Lots of Selves, Some Rebellious: Developing the Self Discrepancy Model for Language Learners.” System 60: 79–92.; [2017]. “Contradictory Others and the Habitus of Languages: Surveying the L2 Motivation Landscape in the United Kingdom.” The Modern Language Journal 101 (3): 517–532.) Self-Discrepancy Theory for Language Learners to enrich the framework, and recruited two different learner groups with Chinese as their first language and English as their second language – voluntary learners of Spanish as a third language and non-voluntary learners of Spanish. The Q-methodology was applied to profile these two groups’ multilingual selves, with four motivational profiles emerging from the analysis: self-motivated with multilingual posture, self-motivated with instrumentality, other-motivated with promotion-focused instrumentality, and other-motivated with prevention-focused instrumentality. The findings revealed that multilingual posture was prominent in the self-motivated learners’ investment in learning Spanish, and the other-motivated learners were subjugated to the macro-level sociological influences of global English and the national foreign language policy. Our findings also suggested a potential gate-keeping role of global English in conceptualising non-Anglophone learners’ LOTE learning motivation. This paper concludes with some methodological and theoretical implications for future LOTE learning motivation research.

KEYWORDS:

• L2 learning motivation
• Own-Other standpoints
• languages other than English (LOTEs)
• motivational profiles
• Spanish

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our gratitude to the participants who took time to finish the Q-sorting tasks. We are also grateful to Prof. John Edwards for his gracious support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Yongyan Zheng http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0664-3942

Notes

1 In July 2016 the Chinese Ministry of Education (MOE) issued the plan for ‘Developing Educational Cooperation along the Belt and Road’, stressing the need to expand LOTE education in China’s secondary- and tertiary-level institutions. This initiative is believed to align with the country’s ‘Belt and Road’ initiative.

2 In an inverted factor analysis, groupings are based on the ranking of all items in relation to one another. Therefore, the extracted factors represent groups of people who share similar viewpoints. See Watts and Stenner (2012) for details.

3 We followed the Q-methodology convention to label the participant as a Q sort, so English major students are labeled as QE + student number, whereas Spanish major students as QS + student number.