Motivation and Interlanguage Pragmatics in Iranian English Language Learners

It is generally believed that interlanguage pragmatics and motivation play important roles in learning. Motivation is important because it determines the extent of the learner’s active involvement and attitude toward learning. The major purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of integrative and instrumental motivation on the development of interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) in Iranian English language learners. A secondary goal of this study was to assess the effect of the type of motivation on pragmatic transfer. To this end, the Attitude/Motivation Test Battery (AMTB) developed by Gardner (1985) was given to the students to distinguish learners with integrative and instrumental motivation. Finally, 40 integratively and 40 instrumentally motivated learners were selected as participants. Then, a Discourse Completion Task (DCT) regarding pragmatic transfer developed by the researchers was administered to the two groups. Two weeks later another interlanguage pragmatics Discourse Completion Task (DCT) was administered in order to elicit the required data from both groups. The findings demonstrate that there is a significant relationship between type of motivation and interlanguage pragmatic development and the amount of negative pragmatic transfer as well. More precisely, this study revealed that integratively motivated learners performed significantly better than instrumentally motivated learners in both ILP development and pragmatic transfer.