Motivation and Foreign Language Learning: From Theory to Practice

Over the past 20 years or so, motivation has moved from being a peripheral issue in language education to a prominent position in the thoughts of both educators and researchers. For teachers, motivation appears to offer a route to improved learning outcomes, since there is a broad consensus that motivation is a key factor in achievement; for theoretically oriented researchers, the challenge of understanding and explaining the range of possibilities informing language learner behaviour is proving to be an irresistible one. Evidence of the growing awareness of the importance of motivation on the part of classroom practitioners can be found in the frequent discussions of the topic in practice-oriented forums and the popularity of workshops concerned with learner motivation. On the theoretical side, recent years have witnessed a huge ‘publication surge’ ( Boo, Dörnyei, and Ryan 2015 ) in motivation studies, with a spectacular increase in the number of academic journal articles and books devoted to the topic. A crucial factor behind this high level of activity is that motivation appears to be an area where abstract theoretical considerations connect to classroom realities ( Dörnyei and Ryan 2015 ). However, these two strains of inquiry—the theoretical and the practical—have tended to exist independently and there is now a clear need for work that explicitly addresses their links. As the editors of Motivation and Foreign Language Learning: From Theory to Practice observe, ‘The ever increasing workload of teachers leaves little time for searching through the currently abundant literature on motivation’ (p. 177). And the same can be true for researchers, who are often too absorbed in theoretical complexities to explore practical classroom applications. This is the important gap that Motivation and Foreign Language Learning: From Theory to Practice aims to address.