Using motigraphs to investigate the temporalities of motivation: Illustrating contrasting approaches

Factors that affect the ability to maintain motivation to learn a language are known to vary across individuals and periods of learning. The temporality of language learning motivation is therefore inherently intertwined with learners’ ability to identify and achieve their language-related goals. A motigraph is a tool that can be used to collect individual data on the temporal dynamics of language learning motivation. Through motigraphs, data is elicited from participants by asking them to self-assess their levels of motivation in real-time as a means of visualising their language learning journeys. Participants are then asked to explain and reflect on their motigraphs in follow-up interviews. In this article, we illustrate contrasting examples of how motigraphs can be used to collect data with participants at different life stages in two longitudinal qualitative studies. In the first example, the participants are adult migrants in England, where the researcher used motigraphs to elicit reflections on the participants’ past education, current struggles in a new country and often-delayed future plans. In the second example, the participants are Chinese school children, whose concept of time is still developing and whose goals are to be achieved far into the future. We discuss how each age group utilised motigraphs to explain their individual relationships with time and motivation, along with the challenges and affordances of such an approach. We conclude with suggestions for future directions for using motigraphs as a qualitative data collection tool in applied linguistics research.