This edited volume focuses on the experiences of individuals learning languages other than English (LOTEs) in a range of Asian contexts that have traditionally been under-represented in the literature. Aligning with the ‘multilingual turn’ in SLA, it views learners as individuals of a multilingual society with unique, complex, heterogenous and dynamic identities. The chapters explore the learners’ motivational trajectories, multilingual identities and their conceptualisations of the ‘ideal multilingual self’. This volume enhances our critical understanding of language learning motivation through empirical findings and conceptual insights from studies of motivation in specific regions in Asia, including Greater China, Indonesia, Japan, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Pakistan and Syria. Providing insight into the multilingual identities of individuals learning LOTEs, it will appeal to students and scholars in second language acquisition, researchers in language learning motivation and policymakers in language education.

This book investigates how learners' motivations and identities are constructed in the process of learning and using multiple languages in Asian contexts. It presents examples of multilingual contexts in different parts of Asia and illustrates various achievements and challenges associated with multilingual education. Drawing on recent theoretical developments regarding learners' motivations and identities in language learning-related research, this book uncovers learners' motivations that underlie their decisions of learning multiple languages in Asian contexts. Through empirical studies, the authors offer conceptual interpretations on emerging concepts such as dual-motivation system, motivation dynamics, motivational transformation episodes, and hierarchies of identities. In addition to being highly relevant to researchers of applied linguistics, this book is a valuable reference for every university and college library that serves a faculty or school of education.

This book investigates how learners' motivations and identities are constructed in the process of learning and using multiple languages in Asian contexts. It presents examples of multilingual contexts in different parts of Asia and illustrates various achievements and challenges associated with multilingual education. Drawing on recent theoretical developments regarding learners' motivations and identities in language learning-related research, this book uncovers learners' motivations that underlie their decisions of learning multiple languages in Asian contexts. Through empirical studies, the authors offer conceptual interpretations on emerging concepts such as dual-motivation system, motivation dynamics, motivational transformation episodes, and hierarchies of identities. In addition to being highly relevant to researchers of applied linguistics, this book is a valuable reference for every university and college library that serves a faculty or school of education.

Philosopher, physicist, and anarchist Paul Feyerabend was one of the most unconventional scholars of his time. His book Against Method has become a modern classic. Yet it is not well known that Feyerabend spent many years working on a philosophy of nature that was intended to comprise three volumes covering the period from the earliest traces of stone age cave paintings to the atomic physics of the 20th century – a project that, as he conveyed in a letter to Imre Lakatos, almost drove him nuts: “Damn the ,Naturphilosophie.” The book’s manuscript was long believed to have been lost. Recently, however, a typescript constituting the first volume of the project was unexpectedly discovered at the University of Konstanz. In this volume Feyerabend explores the significance of myths for the early period of natural philosophy, as well as the transition from Homer’s “aggregate universe” to Parmenides’ uniform ontology. He focuses on the rise of rationalism in Greek antiquity, which he considers a disastrous development, and the associated separation of man from nature. Thus Feyerabend explores the prehistory of science in his familiar polemical and extraordinarily learned manner. The volume contains numerous pictures and drawings by Feyerabend himself. It also contains hitherto unpublished biographical material that will help to round up our overall image of one of the most influential radical philosophers of the twentieth century.

Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data from teachers and students in Hong Kong’s secondary schools, this book examines critical questions in relation to language learning motivation and instructional contexts. Readers are provided with a critical overview of developments in theory and research on language learning motivation and the potential to further extend these developments. Grounded in the Douglas Fir Group conceptualization of language learning, the book explores the complex interplay of diverse factors that shape learners’ motivation. It offers a unique window into the situated nature of language learning motivation in the macro, meso, and micro contexts of a Chinese heritage society. In so doing, it brings the Chinese voice into the theorization of this important language learning construct. Potential future research avenues are suggested, and implications for policy and practice are discussed. This book will be a useful resource for academics and postgraduates interested in the fields of English as a second language (ESL), English language teaching, language teaching and learning.

This book provides rare insights into motivation among extremely successful learners of English and languages other than English (LOTEs) through the analysis of a longitudinal study and the examination of the factors involved in becoming multilingual in a non-multilingual environment. Based on sixteen interview sessions, conducted over the course of nine years while the learners progressed from high school to the world of work, this book offers the story of how two learners persist in English/LOTE learning. The study illuminates the long-term processes through which the interviewees develop ideal English/LOTE selves in an environment where multilingualism is not emphasized and where both English and LOTEs can still be described as foreign languages. Educators and researchers will learn from this study, which stretches our understanding of motivation beyond the recent theorizing of L2 motivation and contributes to the limited research in long-term motivational trajectories and LOTE learning motivation, which is particularly scarce in non-European contexts. The book will be of interest not only to readers in Japan but also to those in other contexts as it offers an example of successful learners who go beyond the pragmatic and instrumentalist view of language learning to hold a more holistic view, thus revealing the factors which can sustain multiple language learning, even in foreign language contexts.

Due to its theoretical and educational significance within the language learning process, the study of L2 motivation has been an important area of second language acquisition research for several decades. Over the last few years L2 motivation research has taken an exciting new turn by focusing increasingly on the language learner’s situated identity and various self-perceptions. As a result, the concept of L2 motivation is currently in the process of being radically reconceptualised and re-theorised in the context of contemporary notions of self and identity. With contributions by leading European, North American and Asian scholars, this volume brings together the first comprehensive anthology of key conceptual and empirical papers that mark this important paradigmatic shift.