英語学習における動機付け：多様なアプローチに向けて

In the 1990s the study of L2 motivation provided a variety of directions which have not been seen in the traditional social psychological approach, and further continues to expand to wider directions in this new century. As Dornyei and Schmidt (2001) suggest, "L2 motivation research has reached maturity" and "the motivational basis of second language acquisition is a fertile ground for investigation" (p. ix). Unfortunately, however, in Japan we have not seen L2 motivation studies embodying variety of topics and methods so far. Our aim is thus to offer some of the current thinking on L2 motivation and to outline a number of exciting and potentially fruitful future research directions. First, we discuss what motivation is, why we work on motivation, and what we should pay attention to in motivation research. Then, we spotlight motivation research from three different perspectives (socio-cultural/situational, social constructivist, and social-psychological) that have received little attention in L2 motivation field in Japan.