Introduction

Leaving the classroom, I felt uneasy. Puzzled. As a foreign language teacher, there was something nagging me. That said, the students had not given me any overt cause for concern. It was not that they paid little attention. They had not slept, or walked out of the classroom, as I had experienced in extreme cases in the past. We were working through the material on time and on target. Each lesson they participated in the activities I had planned. Yet there was a lack of engagement, a sense of little passion. What was driving, or rather not driving, my students' motivation in the classroom each lesson?

Classroom foreign language teachers work day in and day out to foster more effective learning environments with students. Part of this quest involves striving to gain a greater understanding of what motivates learners in the classroom. While different theoretical constructs abound, the essence of motivation is that it refers to the direction and magnitude of human behaviour, that is, why, how long, and how hard people try to do something (Dörnyei, 2001: 7). It is a want towards future action. My own interest in classroom motivation has emerged from a range of experiences teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) in Japan over the past 17 years. In some settings, students have professed a wish to study 'authentic', communicative oral English for travel or business. Yet while they seem to have a clear-cut purpose to their studies and are active during our time together, individual students' drive to conduct additional study outside lessons has varied greatly. In other situations, students have had very little in the way of opportunities to use English in their everyday lives. Nevertheless, students (and teachers) have together enriched the class atmosphere, the class motivation, with their enthusiasm in using basic English to carry out tasks and interactive activities.

This book presents my own journey in working to conceptualise the complex and dynamic interactions that influence the evolution of the motivation of a language class group. It describes the processes of action research through which I came to understand classroom language learning motivation as emerging from constantly changing relations between elements of the classroom system and the experiences and perceptions of class members, and why this matters. Following the work of such scholars as Miyahara (2015) and Takahashi (2013), the book also aims to lend support to a more narrative-based and situated approach to representing the insights gained through listening to the voices of those involved in additional language learning.

Setting the Scene: Misplaced Expectations

Just before commencing the research project that forms the basis of this book, I had gained full-time employment at a kosen, a Japanese National College of Technology. These colleges combine the traditional three years of senior-high school in Japan with the first two years of university. Students range from around 15 to 20 years old. The institutions specialise in producing young technologists who are ready to apply their knowledge and skills on graduation. English studies are part of a compulsory set of subjects. One of my primary motivations for seeking employment at a kosen had been my belief that the style of education would be very practical, with students learning by doing. I predicted that the clear focus of the kosen system on future outcomes – producing practical, work-ready technologists – would encourage students and teachers to be cognisant of how graduates might use English in the future in a variety of engineering fields.

My expectations turned out to be overly simplistic. Many of the students I was teaching seemed disinterested and lacking direction in their English studies. Such a decrease in motivation – termed demotivation – is something not uncommon in Japanese classrooms (e.g. Carpenter et al., 2009; Kikuchi & Sakai, 2009; see also Chapter 2). The students' apparent aimlessness reminded me of research I had conducted previously at a women's university (Sampson, 2012). While in that case the English-major learners had been engaged during lessons, conversations with them revealed very little about how they imagined themselves using English after the completion of their studies. An apparent lack of purpose and ownership of their learning puzzled me as I worked with them each lesson. I therefore decided to introduce a range of classroom activities designed to encourage them to think about their future using English. The study found students to be motivated by activities which: (a) assisted them in thinking about steps they could take towards an ideal self using English; (b) allowed them to add detail to this ideal or a feared self; and (c) had a social component encouraging them to share reflections about their (future) self ideas.

Influenced by my experiences at the women's university, my perceptions of demotivation in kosen classrooms prompted me to ask learners to reflect on their English studies. I decided to encourage students in five of my classes (18- to 19-year-old students) to write freely about why they believed they were currently studying English, and in what ways they envisioned themselves using English in the future. My concerns deepened. Responses to the first question were ultimately rather vague: words like 'globalisation', 'world language' and 'international language' were recurrently representative. Furthermore, students expressed no clear purpose for the activities they might undertake using English in the future, giving responses such as:

• 'Read something in English' (Japanese response)

• 'Listen a news' (English response)

• 'Do conversation' (Japanese response)

• 'I don't know' (Japanese response)

Although these students had been studying for a number of years at this college, their reactions indicated a disturbing lack of understanding of the purpose of their English studies in the classroom. A conversation with one of these students further motivated me in the research project that is the focus of this...