Learning a Third Language - College Students' Motivation for Different Languages in an Asian Context

Although English has long been the most popular foreign language among learners at all levels of education, governmental resources have been devoted to the education of a myriad of additional foreign languages in the past decade in Taiwan. Such efforts and their effects, however, have rarely been studied and reported. Informed by Dörnyei’s L2 Motivational Self System, this study investigated learners’ motivation to learn three clusters of L3 - European (German, Spanish, and French), Northeast Asian (Japanese and Korean), and Southeast Asian (Vietnamese, Thai, and Malay) languages.

In addition, it compared learners' L3 motivation with their L2 English motivation. A motivation questionnaire covering constructs including ideal self, ought-to self, learning experience, culture interest, and instrumentality was administered twice to 800 learners enrolled in these selected L3 courses, at the beginning of term on English and at the end of term on the specific L3 they were learning. ANOVA, t-tests, and regression analyses were used to examine motivational patterns of different L3s and compared them to the same learners' English learning motivation. In-depth interviews with students and their teachers helped gain insights into the patterns observed. It was found that motivation varied among languages and seemed to be related to the collective societal attitudes toward particular languages and their associated cultures. Besides, culture and instrumentality were consistently a more robust predictor of learning motivation in various L3s, while English motivation was more highly related to the ought-to self. The results are interpreted with reference to historical and contextual background of governmental policies.