Journal of the National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages (Jan 2008)
Why College Students Want to Learn Asian Languages: A Comparative Study of Motivational Factors for the Selection of Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vi-etnamese
Abstract
In recent years, more higher educational institutions started to offer less commonly taught languages, and the enrollments in Asian languages have been increasing. However, little was known about why students are interested in the study of a certain Asian lan-guage. This study investigates students’ motivation in the selection of one of four Asian languages: Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Viet-namese, and compares the motivational factors across these lan-guages. Ninety-nine college students who enrolled in the first semes-ter of one of these Asian language classes responded to a Likert-scale questionnaire and open-ended questions. The findings showed that a wide variety of reasons initially motivated college students to learn an Asian language. These fell into six major motivational fac-tors: cultural understanding, heritage-related factor, instrumental ori-entation, integrative orientation, achievement orientation, and admin-istrative. The study found that there were both similarities and differences in the motivational factors across the four Asian lan-guages. The cultural understanding and integrative orientation were the top two shared motivational factors, and administrative orienta-tion was a weak factor across all language groups. In addition, differ-ences in rank order among the six motivational factors were found between East Asian and Southeast Asian languages.
