Given the importance of academic motivation, numerous inquiries have scrutinized the antecedents of this psycho-emotional variable in various educational environments. Nonetheless, the role of students' attitudes in their academic motivation has remained elusive. Put simply, it is unclear whether students' attitudes can make positive changes in…

Role models and motivators can influence young people in a general sense and have a significant effect on their values and beliefs. As part of a larger project, we investigated the presence of L2 (second language) role models and motivators among 12 Japanese high school students (aged between 15 and 18), who took part in one-to-one interviews with…

The present paper aims to explore how a certain class mode emerges in the context of collaborative learning, which affects student motivation and learning. Multiple sources of data were collected from 51 high school students in three different classes (named A, B and C) where the same teacher gave them the same lesson content throughout a full…

Purpose: Amidst ongoing attempts to think beyond Western frameworks for education, there is a tendency to overlook Japan, perhaps because it appears highly modern. This is striking given that some prominent strands of Japanese philosophy have formulated an explicit and exacting challenge to the core onto-epistemic premises of modern Western…

The purposes of this study are (1) to longitudinally measure the receptive vocabulary size (VS) of Japanese EFL senior high school learners; (2) to investigate how the learners develop their VS; and (3) to describe the longitudinal developmental patterns of VS of each learner during their three years of high school. Kasahara's (2005) VS tests, a…

Self-regulated learning explores learners' complex intrinsic factors, including their learning strategies and motivation to learn. It offers learners the opportunity to become autonomous--a situation that is essential for ensuring that Japanese students acquire English proficiency. This study aims to explore the factors involved in self-regulated…

This study examined the relationship between learners' motivation to learn a second language (L2) and persistence in their learning using self-instructional radio (SIR) materials with a sample of Japanese high school students learning English. L2 self-instruction remains under-researched, in spite of the importance of out-of-class learning…

These two decades have seen a surge in interest in the study of motivation throughout the field of language acquisition. Several distinguished motivational theories have been established: self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985), goal-setting theories (Locke & Latham, 1990), attribution theory (Weiner, 1992), self-worth theory…