• Organisation

Although research on motivation in second language acquisition (SLA) has generated a wealth of literature for more than four decades, there is a sense in which theories of motivation and related affective determinants of L2 behaviour remain isolated from mainstream applied linguistic research, interacting only tangentially with the key issues preoccupying the field (cf. Dörnyei, 2003). To a large extent, this lack of interaction is a function of the macro perspective that L2 motivation theory has tended to adopt, where the focus has been on general motivational dispositions and influences in relation to global learning outcomes and behaviours. A focus on tasks as the unit of analysis brings to a head the recent shift from the macro perspective towards more situation-specific and process-oriented approaches to investigating L2 motivation (Dörnyei, 2000; Julkunen, 2001; Ushioda, 1996). Implicit in all of this research is the role of motivation as a prerequisite for cognitive engagement in any instructional task. Nevertheless, empirical studies on tasks and motivational processing have been few and far between. In an exploratory study, Dörnyei and Kormos (2000) investigated how tasks can be researched by involving motivational and other socio-dynamic variables. In this research, the linguistic variables were only concerned with the quantity of speech produced, which was argued to be an important determinant of task-engagement, and as such an important factor in SLA (see Swain’s 1985 output hypothesis). In a follow-up to this study conducted on the same database, Dörnyei (2002) analysed how the partner’s motivation influenced the amount of talk produced in the same argumentative task. He found that the interlocutors’ motivational disposition is a key factor that affects the learner’s appraisal and action control processes, that is, task motivation is co-constructed by the task participants. The results of Dörnyei and Kormos (2000) and Dörnyei’s (2002) study proved that the investigation of the effect of motivation and its co-construction by the participants on task-performance is a worthwhile endeavour. The shortcoming of these studies, however, was, that they only concentrated on the quantity of speech produced by the participants and did not analyse other linguistic variables. Therefore, we believed that further insights could be gained into the effect of social factors on task-performance if other linguistic variables were added to the analysis, and thereby the obtained results could be better integrated into main-stream task-based research. A complete reanalysis of the dataset added five further criterion measures to the two that we used in the earlier studies, ranging from an index of the quality of argumentation to speech complexity and lexical richness. Thus, whereas the previous studies only addressed the question of variation in the participants’ task engagements (i.e. size of speech), the current analysis covers a wide range of the characteristics of the task participants’ oral contribution to the task.