SCHOOL BELONGING AND L2 MOTIVATION OF FIRST-YEAR STUDENTS AT FOUR JAPANESE UNIVERSITIES

Abstract

In this study, I explore the dynamic relationships between how students feel about their school, school belonging, and to what extent they feel motivated to study a second language, L2 motivation. School belonging, which has rarely been studied in the field of applied linguistics, is widely discussed in educational psychology, and its relationship with academic achievement has been examined. However, the relationship between school belonging and L2 motivation has hardly been investigated. The first purpose of this study is to fill this gap by verifying the existence of a sense of school belonging as a psychological factor among first-year Japanese university students in an English as a foreign language context, and then to investigate its relationship with L2 motivation. I employ a convergent mixed method design in which the quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted at the same time. Quantitative data were collected through surveys from 540 first-year students in four Japanese universities, including higher- and lower-ranked universities. The qualitative data were collected through self-reflection from 176 students, comments from 413 students, and interviews with 11 students. The interviewees were selected based on their willingness to participate. The quantitative data and qualitative data were collected three times in 2018 and 2019: the first time in May and June 2018, the second time in September and October 2018, and the third time in January and February 2019. Validity evidence for the surveys was gathered through a pilot study. In the main study, school belonging was verified as one large factor mainly using Rasch analysis. The general relationship between school belonging and motivation to learn English and the changes of those relationships over the course of the year were assessed by calculating the responses to the questions with structural equation modeling (SEM). Details of students’ feelings toward their school and their connections to English learning motivation were investigated through analyses of the qualitative data. The quantitative results showed that a sense of school belonging that varies among first-year Japanese university students exists and that the relationship between school belonging and L2 motivation and their changes over the course of the year can be explained in a model in which individual differences in school belonging and L2 motivation and their changes are explained. The qualitative results support the finding that school belonging and L2 motivation are related to each other and also show that students change their school belonging and L2 motivation dynamically for a variety of reasons. Students can change their perceptions of school and language learning from positive to negative or negative to positive, and their changes can be uneven when looked at through the lens of sub-components of these constructs. By merging quantitative results and qualitative results, differences were found between the two types of data analyses. School was found to predict changes in school belonging and L2 motivation in the quantitative analyses, while different types of students, such as those who have positive school belonging and negative L2 motivation and those who have negative school belonging and positive L2 motivation were found in the same school in the qualitative analyses. Moreover, concepts of school belonging and L2 motivation were validated as hypothesized in the quantitative analyses, while unexpected ideas, such as belonging to multiple groups and loss of L2 motivation due to technological developments, were revealed by the result of the qualitative analyses. These results imply that fostering school belonging among university students can lead to studying English harder.