The earliest and most influential motivation research in the L2 field came from social psychologists in Canada, Gardner, Lambert and their associates, working on Anglophone Canadians learning French. In their initial study, Gardner and Lambert (1959) found three motivational factors related to their students’ orientation to learning French, including motivation to learn the language, attitudes toward Canadian French, and proficiency in French. In their subsequent research (Gardner &
Lambert, 1972), attitudes and motivation were confirmed to be significant factors associated with students’ achievement in second languages. The research further proposed a more complex pattern of relationships. These two social- psychological-based L2 motivation approaches were later expounded upon by Gardner and his associates (Gardner, 1985, 1988; Tremblay & Gardner, 1995) into the socio-educational model of second language acquisition. This model posits that individual’s motivation to learn an L2 will be affected by social-cultural values, and the impact will lead to different degrees of effort an individual spends on the study of a second language, which will result in further differences in the success of the study.
This model was developed more than three decades ago and the main concern of this model is the role of various individual differences of learners associated with their goal-directed, L2 learning approach. In addition, adopted from a social-psychological approach, Gardner and his associates posited that student’s L2 learning motivation is determined by “his attitudes and readiness to identify and by his orientation to the whole process of learning a foreign language” (Gardner & Lambert, 1972, p. 132).
The individual’s attitudes towards the L2 and the L2 community influence his or her motivation to learn the target language. With respect to this approach, L2 learning motivation is attitude-oriented and goal-directed, with a focus on the intrapersonal,
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psychological perspectives within inter-group contexts. Gardner’s theory doesn’t seem to place any emphasis on the impact of immediate interpersonal interaction or social environment in L2 learning.
Central to this model is the elaboration of the concept “Integrative Motive”
which is perhaps the most widely researched. Integrative Motive is defined as a
“motivation to learn a second language because of positive feelings toward the community that speaks that language” (Gardner, 1985, p. 82-83). There are three major components embodied in this complicated construct: Integrativeness, referring to individual’s willingness and interest in social interaction with the L2 community;
Attitudes towards the Learning Situation, reflecting students’ attitudes toward the L2
teachers and the L2 courses, and Motivation, concerning a learner’s attitudes, aspirations, and effort to learn the target language. Each component is made up of two to three subcomponents (see Figure 2.1 for more details).
Figure 2.1 Gardner’s conceptualization of integrative motives
INTEGRATIVESNESS
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Criticisms of Gardner’s Socio-Educational Model
From Figure 2.1, we can see Integrative Motive is composed of three main components: Integrativeness and Attitudes towards the Learning Situation leading to
Motivation, which indicate motivation is the resultant of the two components, which
then serve as the determinants of the construct Motivation, which itself is composed of three subcomponents. The relationships between the motivational components (integrative motive, integrative orientation, motivation, and motivational intensity) do not demonstrate clear distinctive definitions between them, and these terms thus become confusing and misleading. Likewise, the term “integrative” in Integrative Motive, Integrativeness, Integrative Orientation has by no means clarified anything but misunderstandings (Dörnyei, 1994). In addition to this, the term “attitudes towards learning the L2” is likely to be confused with the latent variable “attitudes towards the learning situation”, with the former an indicator of motivation and the latter a variable of two evaluative, attitude indicators. The distinctions between the terms were difficult to define and it is easy to confuse them (Dörnyei, 2003)Furthermore, in Gardner’s socio-educational model, learning a second language was viewed as a mediating factor of inter-ethnic communication in multicultural settings. This approach may be useful to capture the motivational patterns of whole learning communities, and its findings may infer discussions on intercultural communication, multiculturalism and language globalization (Dörnyei, 2005).
However, this macro-perspective of inter-ethnic communication cannot cater to the possible motivational antecedents, i.e. the motivational influence of the actual learning context. In other words, the microcontext of the immediate learning situation, particularly for a large group of EFL learners, who are in a monolingual and monocultural context, will have a strong impact on the learner’s motivation to learn a
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second language. Learning a foreign language is a required school subject for most EFL learners, and these learners have very limited opportunities to contact with L2 native speakers. Therefore the macro-perspective of inter-ethnic communication may be less influential to EFL learners.
In addition, the term “integrative” motivation concerns L2 learner’s affective disposition toward target community and the desire to identify with L2 group. As discussed above, EFL learners have very limited opportunities to contact with L2 native speakers, let alone immersed in any L2 community environment. Thus, the concept “integrative” motivation may not do justice to EFL learners since they are different from learners in Canadian contexts, immersed in the L2 environment.
Accordingly, Gardner and his associates’ macro-perspective of L2 learning motivation may not be appropriate to explain the motives associated with the more intricate learning processes in EFL contexts on one hand, and the motivational scenarios in contexts of factors in actual learning environments on the other. McGroarty (2001) has characterized the situation which has emerged as follows:
Existing research on L2 motivation, like much research in educational psychology, has begun to discover the multiple and mutually influential connections between individuals and their many social contexts, contexts that can play a facilitative, neutral, or inhibitory role with respect to further learning, including L2 learning. (p.
86)
Criticism of Gardner’s AMTB
As Dörnyei (2005) pointed out, Gardner’s Attitude/Motivation Test Battery (AMTB) is composed of all the main components of Gardner’s theory of the
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Integrative Motive and other additional important components, such as language anxiety and instrumental orientation. The AMTB is a very well-designed instrument and has structure that follows the psychometric principles governing questionnaire theory (Dörnyei, 2005). However, as research (Dörnyei, 1994) has pointed out, the three subcomponents of Motivation (desire to learn the L2, motivational intensity, and attitudes toward learning the L2) overlapped at the items level, and are therefore likely to present high intercorrelations between the scales. The second problematic issue concerns the content statements in operationalizing the “Motivation”
subcomponent, in which motivated behavior should be in relation to the consequences of a series of motivation chained behavior.
In addition, a subcomponent of “Motivation,” motivation intensity, representing the amount of effort that a learner exerted to their L2 learning, does not target the unobservable mental phenomenon of motivation. The last two problems demonstrate that the AMTB does not only assess motivation, but also the motivated behavior (Dörnyei’s term, 2005), which seems to be reasonably categorized as motivated L2 strategic behavior. With the combination of items concerning the unobservable motivation and the observable behavior, the instrument will then present higher predictive validity. With regard to these three issues mentioned, the AMTB may thus raise problems, such as content validity, high intercorrelation between scales, and artificially high predictive validity of the instrument. Though the discussion of Gardner’s AMTB elicits some item problems, it does not mean to diminish its importance or impact in L2 motivation research because of the “pervasive use of the battery of tests (Attitude/Motivation Test Battery) developed to measure it” (Jacques, 2001, p. 186). On the contrary, the problems raised by the instrument provide us an opportunity to re-theorize the construct of L2 learning motivation, and due attention
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should be paid to the distinction between phases in motivation formation and behavioral engagement.