This paper discusses the roles of the student, teacher, and language researcher in understanding motivation to learn another language. It highlights the socioeducational model of second language acquisition. Although this model considers motivation to learn another language from the student's point of view, other contributors include the teacher, the student's background, and the teacher's background. The language researcher's role is to code the process and investigate it in ways that will help to more fully understand it. One feature of the socioeducational model is the set of variables it has identified and the means of assessing these variables so that specific hypotheses about the nature and influence of motivation in second language learning can be evaluated. The paper makes general observations about research findings that have been obtained and focuses on one study that considers the stability of motivational variables. The issue of motivational stability is currently of interest in the literature and concerns the question of whether motivation is stable or fluid. Discussion of findings from this study focus on the distinction between motivation and motivating and on the implications this could have for the language teacher and the language researcher. (Contains 15 references.) (SM)