Motivational Factors in Multilingual Students' Learning Additional Languages: The Case of English and Turkish

Abstract

The current study examined the relationships among motivational factors (i.e., motivation types andmotivational strength, and language anxiety) in the simultaneous learning process of additionallanguages. A mixed-methods design was conducted with 86 multilingual learners learning bothEnglish and Turkish. The data were collected using a survey and follow-up open-ended questions aboutthe motivational factors. There were three major findings of the study. First, the motivational factors inone language were positively correlated with the same factors in another. Second, although thelearners' motivation (i.e., intrinsic, extrinsic and integrative) and motivational strength to continuetheir education showed no differences in both languages, their L2 anxiety towards learning additionallanguages was statistically different, in that learners were less anxious when learning Englishlanguage than learning Turkish language. Third, multilingual learners' interest in learning otherlanguages and willingness to integrate in the target language culture, the status quo of the targetlanguage in the global world and the level of unfamiliarity of the target language seem to play a role inthe learners' beliefs of motivation, feeling in learning additional languages and intention to studylanguages. Overall, the study highlighted the role of multilingualism in learning English and Turkish.It also shed light on understanding L2 affective factors learning distinct L2s.© 2018 EJAL & the Authors. Published by Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics (EJAL). This is an open-accessarticle distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY-NC-ND)(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).