Language Attrition - Motivation

Motivation

Paradis (2007:128) predicts that "Motivation/affect may play an important role by influencing the activation threshold. Thus attrition may be accelerated by a negative emotional attitude toward L1, which will raise the L1 activation threshold. It may be retarded by a positive emotional attitude toward L1, which will lower its activation threshold." However, the link between motivation and attrition has been difficult to establish. Schmid & Dusseldorp (2010) fail to find any predictors for individual performance among a large number of measures of motivation, identity, and acculturation. Given Paradis' prediction, this finding is surprising, and may be linked to methodological difficulties of measurement: by definition, studies of language attrition are conducted a long time after migration has taken place (speakers investigated in such studies typically have a period of residence in the L2 environment of several decades). The operative factor for the degree of attrition, however, is probably the attitude towards both L1 and L2 at the beginning of this period, when massive and intensive L2 learning is taking place, affecting the overall system of multicompetence. However, attitudes are not stable and constant across a person's life, and what is measured at the moment that the degree of individual attrition is assessed may bear very little relation to the original feelings of the speaker.

It is difficult to see how this methodological problem can be overcome, as it is impossible for the attrition researcher to go back in time, and impractical to measure attitudes at one point in time and attrition effects at a second point, decades later. The only study which has made an attempt in the direction of assessing identity at the time of migration is Schmid (2002), who investigated attrition in historical context. Her analysis of oral history interviews with German Jews points strongly towards an important correlation of attitude and identity at the moment of migration and eventual L1 attrition.

The reasons for this pattern of L1 attrition probably lie in a situation where the persecuted minority had the same L1 as the dominant majority, and the L1 thus became associated with elements of identity of that dominant group. In such situations, a symbolic link between the language and the persecuting regime can lead to a rejection of that language. Discovering such a link and its impact on the language attrition process is extremely complicated for most groups of migrants, since measurements are usually applied a long time after migration took place. However, the findings presented here suggest that it is the attitude at the moment of migration, not what is assessed several decades later, that impacts most strongly on the attritional process.