The interaction of linguistic and motivational variables in second language task performance

By Judit Kormos, Z. Dörnyei. 2004

135 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this study we investigated the role of motivation and some other related individual difference variables such as anxiety and willingness to communicate on the quality (accuracy, complexity, lexical richness, the number of arguments and counter-arguments) and quantity of students' output. We computed correlations between motivational and language variables in the whole sample as well as in two sub-groups of the participants: those who had favourable attitude to the task they had to perform and those who did not. The effect of the partner's motivation was also assessed. The results suggest that it is rather the quantity of talk that is influenced by motivation and not the quality of the content produced. In the whole sample it was only course attitudes that had a beneficial effect on the accuracy of the participants' output. When the sample was divided into High and Low task-attitude students, we found that even if students did not like the specific task they had to perform, their accuracy increased if they had a generally positive attitude to the language course itself. It was also revealed that if students’ attitude to the task was negative, their own motivation had little effect on the quality and quantity of language output, instead it was the partner’s motivation that played a role in the performance of the task. If on the other hand, the learners had positive attitudes to the task, it was primarily their own motivation that influenced their performance and not that of the interlocutor.

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Citations in the corpus

Inter-cultural contact and flow in a task-based Japanese EFL classroom (2017, background): “In a final study based on the same data set, Kormos and Dörnyei (2004) looked at how the same motivational factors affected not just the quantity but also the quality of learners’ performances.”
Willingness to Communicate in an L2 and Integrative Motivation among College Students in an Intensive English Language Program in China (2007, methodology): “WTC has also been used as a background variable in Dörnyei and associates’ motivation research (Dörnyei & Kormos, 2000; Kormos & Dörnyei, 2004).”
Willingness to communicate of EFL learners in Turkish context (2015, background): “Later, this challenge was taken up as an independent background variable (Dörnyei, 2002; Kormos & Dörnyei, 2004).”
The dynamic nature of motivation in language learning: A classroom perspective (2012, background): “…important developments in this area, such as, for example, relating motivation to the performance of communicative tasks (e.g., Dörnyei, 2002; Kormos & Dörnyei, 2004), exploring the link between motivation and group dynamics (e.g., Dörnyei, 2001; Ushioda, 2003), identifying the causes and…”
Task Complexity, Focus on L2 Constructions, and Individual Differences: A Classroom-Based Study. (2011, methodology): “The items tapping participants’ linguistic selfconfidence (three items, Cronbach α = .71) and language use anxiety (three items, Cronbach α = .84) were adapted from Kormos and Dörnyei (2004).”