Abstract
Elementary school is as much about developing attitudes as competence. With this fact in mind, the Japanese national government established a plan to enhance elementary school students’ motivation for learning English. The success of this program has, however, not been empirically tested. This study aimed to assess the longitudinal, discrete development of Japanese elementary school students’ motivation for learning English as a foreign language. A cohort of 513 Japanese elementary students participated in the study across 2 years of school. Students responded to surveys regarding the quality of their motivation at three time points, and their engagement at two time points. Latent profile analysis followed by latent profile transition analysis was used to assess the sample for latent subgroups. With subgroups established at three time points, a Mover–Stayer model was tested to estimate the movement of students among the subgroups across three time points and 2 years of elementary school education. Three theoretically consistent latent subgroups were observed at each of the time points. Based on theory and past empirical research, the subgroups (presented from least to most adaptive) were labeled: Poor Quality, High Quantity, and Good Quality. Across the three measurements, an overall shift of students to higher quantity and quality motivational subgroups was observed. This study provides evidence that the low-stakes, high-interest approach currently undertaken may have the desired effect of improving students’ motivation to learn across 2 years of schooling. Implications for both practice and national policy are discussed.
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Notes
We have been made aware of a new means of assessing subgroup reliability pioneered and pursued by Morin and colleagues. We agree that, following substantial replication and refinement, a version of this new method stands a good chance of becoming standard practice for Latent Transition Analyses in the future. This method has been tested by Morin and colleagues in very recent studies (e.g., Ciarrochi et al. 2017; Gillet et al. 2017); all tests, however, have been with data sets using only two time points, where the current study deals with three. Given the fact that: (a) this method has not yet been empirically tested using three or more time points as is used in the current study; (b) this method was not yet available during the design and analysis stage of the current study (between 2013 and 2015); and finally (c) given the substantive rather than methodological aims and hypotheses of the current article, we have deferred to established methods (Nylund 2007; Nylund et al. 2007; Nylund-Gibson et al. 2014) for determining latent subgroups at each time point and the Mover–Stayer model across the three time points.
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Acknowledgements
This study was funded by a JSPS KAKENHI grant-in-aid for young scientists (B) [24720260] and grant-in-aid for scientific research (C) [16K02924]. The authors would like to thank Dr. Yoshiyuki Nakata for his advice on the design and instrumentation of this study.
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Oga-Baldwin, W.L.Q., Fryer, L.K. Schools can improve motivational quality: Profile transitions across early foreign language learning experiences. Motiv Emot 42, 527–545 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-018-9681-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-018-9681-7