Although motivation, identity, and autonomy are known to be closely related concepts in language learning, their study has not always been done side by side. This edited volume represents an attempt to unify their study through an exploration of how their complex and dynamic natures influence second language (L2) learning. Through qualitative research methods, the authors portray a picture of how motivation, identity, and autonomy shape the L2 learning process in different educational contexts and cultural settings and for different types of learners.
The book contains 16 chapters split into three sections. The first section introduces emerging theoretical perspectives in the analysis of motivation, identity, and autonomy. These models are also used in most of the rest of the book. Readers will find useful new connections between opposite theories, such as the integration of metacognition and sociocultural theory to explore agency and metacognition or complexity theory to analyze motivation in language learners. Other perspectives, like complex adaptive systems, are also used to discuss how motivation, identity, and autonomy may influence L2 acquisition in different settings. Each of these chapters illustrates these emerging theoretical models through empirical studies, which gives the reader a better understanding and a more complete picture of how they could be adapted to other research contexts.
The second part of the book explores the relationship between motivation, identity, and autonomy in independent learning settings, such as distance education programs and self-access centers (SACs). Part of this section illustrates how an interconnection between motivation and identity can develop autonomy in learners depending on the specific learning settings in which the studies were carried out. Given the exploratory nature of these studies, the authors reveal interesting findings for the reader to analyze (e.g., the positive but also negative side of self-motivated learners in these settings). It is important to point out that most of these studies rely on Dörnyei’s seminal motivational self-system model (Reference Dörnyei, Dörnyei and Ushioda2009) to portray how learners imagine themselves as successful L2 speakers and how this influences their decisions to handle their own learning. Some chapters in this section are useful not only for researchers but also for practitioners. For instance, Reiders and Lázaro explore an important but often neglected perspective in motivation, identity, and autonomy: the teacher’s perspective. Their chapter analyzes the complexity of teachers’ beliefs about identity and motivation to implement autonomy in SAC contexts. Cowie and Sakui’s chapter 14, in the third part of the book, also deals with teachers’ views on learner motivation and calls for more research that takes teachers into account, given the scarcity of studies that use teachers’ unique insights.
The third part presents studies carried out with L2 learners in different cultures and contexts as well as a couple of studies dealing with teachers’ perspectives from the classroom on motivation, identity, and autonomy. These chapters touch on topics such as agency in L2 learning at home and abroad or the role of agency in the development of autonomy in learners. The different contexts in which these studies were carried out and the specific topics analyzed in each study provide significant insights that could give readers new perspectives on learners’ motivation and that could lead readers to question common assumptions. Additionally, the variety of cultural contexts presented—although they are different and exclusive for each one of the realities portrayed in them—gives readers an idea of how interrelated motivation, identity, and autonomy can be even in very different settings.
One of the attractive features of this book is that, in addition to theory, some chapters provide further suggestions for researchers and practitioners in different contexts. Further, the fact that the studies included here are based on qualitative data is also a reflection of the turn in research not only to investigate the learner’s identity and its interaction with motivation and autonomy but also to understand, at a deeper level, how and why the phenomena at hand contribute to L2 acquisition. Readers more familiar with a quantitative perspective of these issues may feel baffled by the research design of some of the studies. However, this is precisely the strongest aspect of this book in that it approaches these phenomena from a perspective different from the more psychometric and traditional methodology used in researching some of these concepts, like motivation. The authors have compiled a solid volume that has plenty of resources to offer to researchers, students, and practitioners about the complex relationship between motivation, identity, and autonomy in L2 learning.
