Motivation in modern language studies: a pilot study in Italian language

In the field of research on learners’ individual differences (ID), the affective domain, motivation in particular, has been thoroughly examined (Dörnyei and Ryan, 2015). The interest in motivation in SLA dates back to the early 1950s and has since been a very prolific area of research. Recently, in the period between 2005 and 2015, over a hundred publications on motivation in SLA were published, in which a number of various constructs and factors have arisen, confirming that the motivation is a dynamic and complex process (Dörnyei & Ryan, 2015). As a result, a large number of definitions of L2 learning motivation have been employed: from Gardner’s (1985, p. 10) “the extent to which the individual works or strives to learn the language because of a desire to do so and the satisfaction experienced in this activity” to a broader definition by Medved Krajnović: “a set of motives, i.e. of psychological states that move and direct human behaviour and determine its intensity” (2010, p. 77). In this pilot study we shall use the latter definition.