The issue of learner motivation has long exercised researchers and practitioners in the field of
language education. However, it is only within the past decade or so that we have witnessed
productive interaction between the interests of researchers and teachers. Up until the early
1990s, research interest focused primarily on describing, measuring and classifying language
learner motivation and exploring its role in theoretical models of the language learning
process. The findings from such research offered little to teachers concerned with the practical
question of how to motivate their learners and keep them motivated. Moreover, this research
agenda was powerfully shaped by social-psychological perspectives on learner attitudes to
target language cultures and people (Gardner 1985; Gardner and Lambert 1972), while
motivational influences and processes within the social environment of the language
classroom remained relatively unexplored. In a seminal critique of the social-psychological
tradition, Crookes and Schmidt (1991) set forth a new agenda for research on a more
‘practitioner-validated’ classroom-based concept of language learning motivation. The need
to establish closer links between theory and practice and to develop what Dörnyei
(2001a:103) has called more ‘education-friendly’ approaches to language learning motivation
research stimulated an unprecedented wave of discussion during the mid-1990s (for a detailed
summary, see Dörnyei 1998), and has considerably reshaped the direction of theory and
research in the field
