CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Perspectives on L2 motivation: Bridging the gaps between teachers, SLA researchers and teacher educators (Yoshiyuki Nakata, Hyogo University of Teacher Education) Abstract This chapter provides a means of linking L2 motivation theory and research to classroom needs and practices. For many second and foreign language acquisition researchers, the main agenda is to contribute to the academic literature in the hope that teachers can learn from their findings. For most classroom teachers, however, the main concern is simply to improve their own teaching methods in their day-to-day practice. The agenda for many teacher educators who are teaching theories of motivation to students in graduate courses (whether in the field of SLA, educational psychology, or teacher education) naturally then becomes a question of how to help teachers to find effective ways of motivating their students, or how to teach teachers how to discern and utilize the existing motivational theories for their own purposes. The overarching aim of this present paper is to situate student motivation in a broad context of the existing motivation research literature and thereby to unravel a tangled thread of motivation research in the field of English language teaching and applied linguistics. More specifically, the chapter addresses such questions as “how far have we (motivation researchers in Japan) travelled?”, “which aspect of motivation have we examined to date?”, and “what and how do we need to evolve further?”
Posted on: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 02:15:30 +0000