Some Dynamics of Language Attitudes and Motivation: Results of a Longitudinal Nationwide Survey

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine how the significant sociocultural changes that took place in Hungary in the 1990s affected school children's language‐related attitudes and language learning motivation concerning five target languages, English, German, French, Italian, and Russian. The analyses are based on survey data collected from 8,593 13/14‐year‐old pupils on two occasions, in 1993 and 1999. Besides investigating and comparing a number of motivational aspects with regard to the learning of the five target languages, the repeated measure design also allowed us to explore the changes that characterized the learners' motivation between the two phases of the survey. An unexpected but potentially important finding was that during the examined period the learners' general language learning commitment showed a significant decline, with only English maintaining its position. This can be seen as a reflection of a more general ‘language globalization’ process, whereby the study of the world language (i.e. English) and that of other foreign languages show an increasingly deviating motivational pattern.