EXPATRIATE STUDENTS’ MOTIVATION TO LEARN ENGLISH

Abstract

The aim of this article is to present and analyse the motivational factors that drive expatriates in Brussels to learn English as a second language. Brussels is a very cosmopolitan city, where 179 different nationalities live and use English as a lingua franca to communicate among each other. There is not much research on expatriates in the literature on second language learning motivation, and all the available publications focus on the motivation to learn the language of the host country rather than global English. The present study takes a quantitative research approach in the context of Dornyei’s second language self-motivation theory. It employs Taguchi, Magid and Papi’s (2009) questionnaire to understand what motivational factors are most related to the effort expatriates intend to invest in studying English. The surveyed group consists of 40 expatriates learning English in Brussels. The main outcome of the statistical analysis is that the attitudes towards learning English and the incentive values (a variable which includes promotion- and prevention-focused instrumental motives and travel orientation) are the factors most closely related to the intended effort to learn English, whereas the Ideal L2 self and the Ought-to L2 self do not directly correlate with the intended effort.