Applied Linguistics/7

Lecturer : Dwi Maharani, M.Pd

Name : Masmina
Date/Day : Thursday/Nov.19th2015

Summary of: RESEARCHING MOTIVATION: FROM INTEGRATIVENESS TO

THE IDEAL L2 SELF

Language teachers frequently use the term ‘motivation’ when they describe
successful or unsuccesful learners. This reflects our intuitive belief that during the
lengthy and often tedious process of matering a foreign/second language (L2), the
learners enthuasiasm, commitment and persistance are key determinants of succes
or failure. Indeed, in the vast majority of cases, learners with sufficient motivation
can achieve a working knowledge of an L2, regardless of their language aptitude,
whereas without sufficient motivationeven the brightest learnersare unlikely to
persist long enough to attain any really useful language.
There has been a long-live (and inaccurate) understanding in the L2 profession
that language learning motivation can be divided in two main dimensions:
intragative motivation and instrumental motivation. The former refers to the
desire to learn an L2 of a valued community so that onecan communicate with
members of the community and sometimes even to become like them.
Instrumental motivation, on the other hand, is related to the concrete benefits that
language proficiency might bring about (e.g. career opportunities, increased
salary).
The integrative/instrumental distinction has been attributed (again somewhat
inacurately) to the influential work of canadian social psychologist Robert
Gardner (1985,2001), who did indeed introduce these terms but whose theoritical
motivation construct was much more elaborate than this simplistic duality. And
the concept of integrativeness/integrative motivation has become a popular and
much researched concept in L2 research, but starting in 1990 an increasing
number of scholars began to raise issues about how generaliazable the term was.
In the material include the diffrences types of evidence, including statistics,
intuition an available theories. The satistic themselves involve some complexity,
as quantities need to be compared with one another to find which sets of result
support the concept of integrative motivation.
In this chapter also discussed a major theoritical shift that has been taking place
within the field of L2 motivation research. Dörnyei use a number of thehnical
terms in this chapter:
a. He uses the term paradigm to refer to a set of theories which is accepted by
the research community, and the term paradigm shift to describe a major
change from one set of theories to another.
b. He uses the word correlation to describe the relationship between two
things which are connected statistically, in the sense that when one thing
increases the other does too. A correlation can be interpreted to indicate a
cause, but it does not provethe existence of a cause. For example, if an
icrease in smoking corelates with an increase in lung cancer it might be
 hypothesized that smoking causes cancer, but the correlation by itself is not
a proof of this.
c. The term construct, used as in ‘the schematic representation of the final
costruct’. The word construct here is a noun (with the setress on the first
syllable) and means something like ‘model’ or theory’, but with a sense
that the theory has a number of diffrent parts that fit together. Dörnyei uses
the term quite a few times in this chapter, and he avoids confusion by not
using the verb construct (with the stress on the second syllble), as in ‘a
theory was constructed’.

According Dörnyei’s research, The studies did indeed confirm that our
assumptions were correct in the following I present some of the key findings: a).
correlation between traditional integrativeness and the ideal L2 self to check
whether the two constructs can indeed be equated, b). correlations of
integtariveness and the ideal L2 self with criterion measures to see which variable
does a better job at explaining motivated behaviour, c). correlations between
aspect of instrumentality and the ought-to L2 self to check whether traditional
instrumentality can indeed be divided into two distinct types.