L2 Motivation and Multilingual Identities

By tradition, L2 motivation research has a monolingual bias – the motivational systems of a learner’s different languages conceptualized as separate entities rather than as cognitively interconnected. At a time when multilingualism has become a new world order (Douglas Fir Group, ) and where there is evidence of powerful identity experiences connected to speaking several languages (Pavlenko, ) this is unfortunate. In alignment with the multilingual and dynamic turns in SLA (de Bot, ; May, ), and adopting a complexity thought modeling approach (Larsen–Freeman & Cameron, ), this article explores multilingual learners’ L2 motivation. It is suggested that the motivational systems of a multilingual learner’s different languages can be understood as constituting a higher-level multilingual motivational self system that is part of an ecology of interconnected and interpenetrating systems. This system contains multilingual self guides, one of which is the ideal multilingual self. Drawing on construal-level theory (Trope & Liberman, ), the manner and effects of mental representations of an ideal multilingual self are assessed. Finally, it is suggested that motivation deriving from a broader identity that encompasses but, in important ways, transcends a multilingual person’s language-specific identities has a central role to play in multilingual education.