On the face of it, looking at motivation inside the foreign language classroom would seem to make relatively straightforward sense. Classrooms are the places to which learners come to study content deemed necessary for participation in the particular society of which they are members. Encircled by the four walls of the classroom, motivation to learn is the ‘want’ that students develop (or do not develop) through their experiences in these contexts. However, is the classroom in reality so finitely bounded an entity? Considering language learners in formal education, van Lier (2004: 194) clearly draws our attention to the necessity of also considering the classroom as an open system:

There are (at least) two crucial understandings forthcoming from van Lier’s assertion. First, classroom motivation is open to aspects of the dynamic experiences of the learners that make up these spaces. Psychologically, students ‘bring in’ their experiences prior to the lesson, perhaps quite temporally removed or more proximal, as well as those they anticipate in their near or distal future. Secondly, by extension, we can also understand that learners in the classroom are involved with a multitude of different, open systems. If we take a student as our starting point and add some of the common socially and societally defined systems related to the classroom space in which this learner studies, we may arrive at an image like Figure 7.1 that at first seems relatively static and bounded.