Complexity in Classroom Foreign Language Learning Motivation

Reviews / Votes

This is a deeply engaging and thought-provoking book that brings together action research, complexity thinking and self-and-identity perspectives to the analysis of language learning motivation as it evolved among persons-in-context in a particular classroom group over one year. Its reflexive insights will resonate with all of us interested in motivation as language teachers, researchers or teacher-researchers. * Ema Ushioda, University of Warwick, UK * Sampson courageously opens up his classroom to explore how the students and their teacher develop from their emerging eclectic identities and how they socially influence each other. A whole-class awakening through iterations of possible-selves interventions, near-peer interactions, imaginings, self-reflections and mutual understandings, this landmark book establishes practitioner action research as a consequential inquiry in applied linguistics. * Joseph Falout, Nihon University, Japan * This is an ambitious and highly original book, exploring language learning motivation through a novel combination of complexity theory and action research. In his well-informed and insightful work, Richard Sampson has succeeded in integrating these two, seemingly incompatible fields. The outcome is an intriguing diary of a personal academic journey that covers an impressive range of ideas, from future self-images and transportable identities to classroom dynamics and directed motivational currents. * Zoltan Doernyei, University of Nottingham, UK * The book proved to be a rich, gripping and sometimes theoretically demanding read, which I strongly recommend to teachers interested in foreign language learning motivation, regardless of the language they teach. -- Lucy-Jane Collard, University of Westminster, UK * System, 2017 * The author's use of complex systems theory as a way to help understand the motivation of his class over a yearlong course is a valuable addition to the foreign language learning motivation literature. I recommend this book to anyone who wishes to learn more about classroom language learning motivation, especially in the Japanese context. -- Christopher Pirotto, Fukui University of Technology, Japan * JALT Journal, 2018 *