Introduction

Abstract

The study of motivation to learn a second language (L2) or foreign language has a history over 4 decades. It is, in fact, one of the most thoroughly examined areas of second language acquisition, with several books and literally hundreds of research articles and book chapters written on it. Yet in spite of this wealth of theorizing and research findings, it is surprising how uneven and inconsistent our knowledge of the subject is. This, I believe, has two main explanations:1. Motivation theories attempt to investigate nothing less than why humans act and think the way they do. In other words, the scope of motivation research concerns every aspect of our immensely complex human existence, and, quite frankly, it would be rather surprising to find a theory that provides an all‐round explanation of what we do and why.2. Motivation is a multifaceted construct, and the exact nature of the constituent components activated in a particular situation depends greatly on contextual factors. This, of course, is related to the fact that humans are social beings and human action is always embedded in a number of physical and psychological contexts which considerably affect a person's cognition, behavior, and achievement. In the case of L2 learning, this situational dependence appears particularly salient, as various L2 learning situations differ a great deal: Consider, for example, the vast differences between learning a world language, the official second language of a country, a heritage language, a classic but extinct language like Latin, and a language that is seen by the students merely as a compulsory school subject without any additional significance.