Unlike many European countries whose borders with neighbors are on land, Taiwan, an island to the west of Pacific Rim, is separated from its neighbors by the vast ocean. Still, despite the dominance of English, the learning of neighbor languages is a desirable goal for some young adults either because of personal interests or because of close geopolitical, historical, and economic relations with these neighboring countries. In fact, the non-neighbor European languages have also been popular choices among young learners for decades. As most of these languages are not a mandatory requirement, understanding why students chose to enroll, as well as the similarities and differences in learner motivation among these neighbor languages and non-neighbor languages, will provide valuable information for policy formulation as well as for curriculum design.
In this presentation, an overview of foreign language education in Taiwan, including English and languages other than English (LOTE), will first be reported with official statistics from government websites. Focusing on three clusters of languages-Northeastern Asian (Japanese and Korean), Southeastern Asian (Vietnamese, Thai, and Malay/Indonesian), and non-neighbor European (German, French, and Spanish) languages-primary data was collected from forty one-on-one interviews with college and senior high school learners. The results from the first question in the interview-"Why did you choose to take the current LOTE course" was analyzed using grounded theory approach.
Results showed the spectrum of motivation at four expanding contextual levels of the learner self, the immediate family and friend circle, the educational environment, and the social milieu. Most learners were motivated by multiple factors from more than one level. Many inner-circle factors seemed to be outer-circle factors having been identified and integrated by the learner through years of accessibility, familiarity, and personal experiences. Decision making was highly dependent on the affordances and inhibition of logistics, namely the relevant systemic, institutional, and opportunistic factors, although they were seldom highlighted in language motivation studies, especially within its English-dominant tradition. While popular cultures and entertainment seemed to be a strong driving force for learning Northeastern Asian languages and family connections for learning Southeastern Asian languages, learners of non-neighbor European languages made their choices based on positive, but seemingly distant, perceptions towards European cultures and languages. Interestingly, such perceptions on faraway European languages seemed to be lacking the depth of understanding and personal experiences existing in the other two clusters of neighbor languages.
