A Task-Oriented Perspective of Temporal Fluctuation of Motivation for Learning Persian among Foreign Students in Iran

Motivation for learning a new language is both self and time-oriented. The language learner’s motivation experiences gradual fluctuation over time and the view of oneself is different on each timescale of the study. Interaction among different timescales throughout the Second Language Development (SLD) is a novel area of investigation (De Bot, 2015). In order to probe this interactive nature, the present study aimed to examine the motivational dynamics of a group of Persian learners on a longer timescale composed of tasks performed on a shorter timescale. To this end, a group of 96 Arab and Chinese Persian learners in both elementary and intermediate levels were surveyed at the onset (before performing tasks) and the end of the course (after performing tasks) to better picture the interplay of different motivational themes over time. The results revealed different manifestations of components of L2 Motivational Self System (L2MSS) over different timescales of the study. Apart from this evolutionary manifestation of L2MSS components, ANOVA results revealed significant differences between scores of each individual component among these two timescales. In sum, results of the study confirmed temporal and visionary variation in participants’ motivation. Finally, some implications were derived from the findings of the study.