“Don’t You Reckon That Being a Multilingual Person Is Cool?”—Investigating the L3 Learning Motivation of Chinese University Learners

Abstract

In order to deepen our understanding of relationship between third language learning motivation and third language acquisition (TLA), this paper reports on a case study on L3 motivation of two Chinese university students with very similar profiles studying Italian and Thai as L3 respectively. Through analyzing interview transcripts, this study centers on the nuanced picture of differences in learning behavior of two language learners, making an explicit enunciation of their motivational type, following the framework of L2 Motivation Self System (L2MSS) proposed by Dörnyei (2009) and the Self-discrepancy model for language learners (Lanvers, 2016).