What motivates you?

I've been thinking, lately, about the assumptions behind integrative orientation.

For those of you who don't know, integrative orientation is one of the concepts that gets bandied about when the literature concerning language learning (as distinct from "language learner literature", which is literature for language learners) starts talking about intrinsic motivation.

Intrinsic motivation is the idea that we learn something because we just love that thing.  We learn French because, gosh darn it, French is fabulous and we want to learn it.

Integrative orientation is the idea that we are intrinsically motivated because we love the culture behind the language and we want to be a part of it all.  In this case we learn French because the French are awesome and people who speak French are awesome and we want to share in all that awesomeness.

A lot of the stuff about motivating language learners assumes, therefore, that learners will be even more keen to learn if you show them more awesome groovy stuff about the culture and people behind the language.

Show your students French movies and tell them all about French cooking and they will slowly find themselves really wanting to be part of the French scene - this will make them want to learn French on a deep psychological level, which will help them learn French more easily.

Well, there is probably something to that, because when I was in high school I was much more integratively oriented to French (which wasn't offered at my school) than Indonesian (which was).  I took Indonesian because it was on offer, but quite frankly the more they told me about Indonesia, the less I felt like learning Indonesian.

Indonesia just never sounded like a place I wanted to visit.  It's hot, full of people and has poor dental care.  Not to mention dysentery.  I have a distinct lack of interest in places where the public hygiene is so bad they have the name of the place in a colloquialism for abdominal diseases (Bali Belly).  India is also unattractive to me, for more or less the same reasons.

And that whole bartering thing?  That may sound like a fun game, but it really just means the entire population is trying to rip each other off.  The sellers are trying to fleece the buyers for more than the product is worth (and hoping you're dumber than the last guy and will give them much more than it's worth) while the buyers are trying to undercut the sellers and pay less than the product is worth.  That is not a fair and equitable economy, in my books.

So, yeah, pretty much everything everyone told me about Indonesia left me feeling completely disinterested in learning Indonesian.  Kind of like integrative orientation in reverse.  If I'm not interested in the culture, the country or the people, why should I learn this language?

Well, I've recently renewed an interest in Indonesian - but not because I suddenly feel more likely to visit Indonesia.  No, my interest has been sparked by the realisation that Indonesian is an auxiliary language.

It's not the "native" language of anyone in Indonesia, but a standardised register of Malay that has been adopted as the lingua franca of the archipelago.  (I think everyone should, at some point in their lives, mention that at a dinner party:  "Oh, yes, Bahasa Indonesia.  I do believe that's a standardised register of Malay that is used as the lingua franca of the Indonesian archipelago..."  Then quickly change the subject before anyone asks you to explain any of that.)

I kind of knew that in high school, but the concepts of planned and auxiliary languages weren't on my radar at the time.  It probably would have been if someone had mentioned the word "Esperanto".  Even when I was a kid I was interested to know more about that language, but most people seemed to dismiss it.

A couple of months ago I read something that pointed out the artificial (yet successful) nature of Bahasa Indonesia, and suddenly my antennae were up.  I had an "oh, yeah..." moment, shortly followed by a "well, that's actually quite interesting" moment.

Now, coming from the angle that "planned languages are awesome" and "auxiliary languages are neat", I've started to think I might be interested in Indonesian after all.  I still don't think visiting the country sounds like something I actually want to do, but the language is becoming, well, intrinsically interesting.

I wonder if I would have been more engaged with Indonesian in high school if someone had tapped into the "this is an interesting language" side of things, rather than the "when you go to Indonesia..." angle.

And I also wonder if the focus on culture, place and people might actually demotivate people who could otherwise be academically interested in a language?

It would be interesting to find out.