The Language Teacher
05 - 2001
Attitude and Motivation in Language Learning: Revisited
Gregory Strong
Aoyama Gakuin University
As part of its 2001 "Distinguished Lecturer" series, Temple University invited Dr. Robert Gardner to give a public address and to teach a weekend graduate students' seminar. An overflow crowd of a 100 people attended the free lecture.
According to Gardner, for an individual to truly learn a language, he or she must identify with the speakers of it, find the learning situation to be rewarding, and must be motivated. Few ideas have become as influential. In the ten-year period following the 1985 publication of his landmark text Social Psychology in Second Language Learning: The Role of Attitudes and Motivation, (London, Edward Arnold), this was especially true. His work was cited in academic journals some 1,400 times (the number, including, of course, multiple citations in the same journal).
In Japan, his Attitude/Motivation Test Battery has been translated and employed to describe Japanese students learning English (Brown, Robson, & Rosenkjar, 1996; Robinson, Strong & Whittle, 2000). With similar results to Gardner, Yamashiro and McLaughlin (1999) tested 95 junior college students and 125 other university students and found correlations between their motivation and their language proficiency.
A short, genial man with a small white goatee, Gardner, 66, professor emeritus in the Department of Psychology at the University of Western Ontario, proved an energetic, engaging speaker. Candid, at times self-deprecating, he began his talk by describing the origins of his work on motivation while an MA student at McGill University, Montreal, in 1956.
"I'm ideally suited for this kind of research. English is the only language I know." Gardner laughed, "My thesis advisor, Wally Lambert, suspected I might not even be that proficient in English.
"At the time, it was believed that if you had language aptitude, you could learn a language. I said, 'I don't see how you can learn a language if you don't like the group.' Wally turned to me, 'Hey, man, there's your thesis.' I've been doing it for the rest of my life."
Gardner traced the development of the concept of motivation in language learning from the initial premise at the turn of that century that successful language learners had higher intelligence than others. Subsequent writers suggested that motivation and identification with the target language group might be important. However, most of their work was speculative or based upon interviews with very small numbers of learners.
In contrast, Gardner undertook empirical studies. For his PhD, he isolated three factors associated with second language achievement: aptitude, motivation, and integrative orientation -- the degree to which a language learner identifies himself with the speakers of that language. In 1960, the state of computers being what it was, he completed his statistical analysis at MIT which alone among educational institutions had computers large enough to handle the data.
Interest in his work ran particularly high in Canada in the late 1960s as the Federal government tried to improve language education in French and English. In 1974, working with another Canadian researcher, Pat Smythe, he published the A/MTB, the Attitude/Motivation Test Battery. It consisted of a series of Likert scale items such as "I would like to know more French-Canadians" to which students indicated one of several responses from "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree."
Gardner and Smythe added another variable, instrumental motivation or the practical reasons for studying a foreign language such as obtaining a better job. For two years, Gardner worked on the readability and reliability of the items on the test. Then he split the Likert scale between negatively and positively phrased ones such as "I love learning French." The research, primarily among English-Canadian students in eight different locations across Canada, established correlations between high scores on the A/MTB and high levels of proficiency. Regardless of language aptitude, motivated students were more likely to study longer and harder and acquire a second language than other students.
Because most of Gardner's research was conducted in Canada, his results have been sometimes discounted on the basis that Canada is bilingual. During the lecture, Gardner referred to a 1996 Canadian census table of language use indicating that in most regions of the country, only a small portion of the population was bilingual. In effect, Canada is largely monolingual; either English or French is spoken.
At Temple University, Gardner explained how his research with the A/MTB led him to the elaboration of a socio-educational model. In it, language learning is affected by individual differences in intelligence, language aptitude, motivation, and situational variability. It also takes place in a cultural context of community values about the importance and meaningfulness of learning the language. As the A/MTB measures integrativeness of how target language group, it also reflects the contemporary social and political environment of the time. Gardner recalled his appearance before a group of American generals to discuss the Russian language training offered to army interpreters and analysts. "One of these generals said, 'I can assure you Dr. Gardner, that my boys aren't learning Russian because they love the Russians.' 'Okay,' I replied, 'it's how much less they hate them, then'."
During the same period that Gardner produced the A/MTB and elaborated on the socio-educational model, other theoretical models explained the development of competence in a second language. The best known of these are Krashen's "Monitor Model," which states that language learning depends on both conscious and unconscious levels, and Carrol's "Conscious Reinforcement Model," which states language learning occurs through an individual's need to express himself or herself and the positive feedback that comes with successful performance. But Gardner's work is unique in that it has a clear and direct link to empirical research. He pointed out that ultimately such distinct testing of a model is necessary to raise a theory from the level of a description to a tool in formulating plans to improve second language learning.
The same appears to be true today as Gardner's model seems to have been eclipsed by new theories about the effect of motivation on language learning, such as "The Heuristic Model of Variables Influencing Willingness to Communicate" (MacIntyre, Clément, Dörnyei, & Noels, 1998). Gardner described their hierarchical, pyramid-shaped model consisting of such aspects of language learning as communicative behaviour, motivation perspectives, and social and individual context as a very elegant description, but ultimately unprovable because of the number and complexity of relationships in it. Interestingly enough, MacIntyre and Clément were both Gardner's PhD students. Gardner commented, "When Peter MacIntyre was at Temple University last year, he called me 'the data nerd'." Chuckling good-naturedly, he added that he always saw himself as "professing statistics," because of their ability to explain and predict behaviour.
This raised some questions from the graduate students at the seminar. Where did Garner stand on qualitative studies and action research. "I'd do qualitative research tomorrow if I thought I could think of something to investigate," he replied, "but I'm trying to come up with general principles." Commenting on Rebecca Oxford's idea about the place of strategies in language learning, he remarked, "We found strategies negatively correlated to the A/MTB. It was the students who didn't have much language who used the strategies. As someone develops their ability in the language, strategies become less important."
The session concluded with Garner outlining some of his current
research interests. One study, awaiting publication, tracked university
students in different classes learning French over a one-year-period.
At the end of that time, most students showed a fairly constant
level of motivation despite teacher efforts. However, there was
some positive change in attitudes among the students with the
highest scores and a negative one among those who had the lowest
marks.
Finally, with another researcher, Gardner has been testing a mini-version
of the A/MTB consisting of only 11 questions and designed for
use with computer-assisted instruction. At least with the English
students tested, its validity is almost as accurate as the full-length
version. "We can judge the results very quickly." He
laughed ironically, "Which is a way of saying that 30 years
of work was a huge waste of time." Finally, he is also involved
in a meta-analysis of motivation based on some 40 studies. The
seminar ended in warm applause for Gardner, lecturer and researcher,
still very active in the field of language learning.
Brown, J. D., Robson, G., & Rosenkjar, P. (1996). Personality, motivation, anxiety, strategies, and language proficiency of Japanese students. University of Hawai'i Working Papers in ESL, 15, 33-72.
MacIntyre, P.D., Clément, R., Dörnyei, Z., & Noels, K.A. (1998). Conceptualizing willingness to communicate in a L2: A situational model of L2 confidence and affiliation. Modern Language Journal, 82, 545-562.
Robinson, P., Strong, G., & Whittle, J. (2000, March). Comparing tasks and skills in developing discussions. Paper presented at TESOL2000, the annual conference for the Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Vancouver.
Yamashiro, A., & McLaughlin, J. (2000). Relationships among attitudes, motivation, anxiety and English language proficiency in Japanese college students. In S. Cornwell & P. Robinson (Eds.), Individual differences in foreign language learning: Proceedings of the symposium on intelligence, aptitude and motivation. Aoyama Gakuin University: Tokyo.
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