ABSTRACT
“I was less scared to bungy jump than to speak this language”
- A qualitative research of adult learners’ motivation for learning Danish

Motivation has primarily been investigated within a specific sociopsychology school of thought (Gardner & Lambert 1972, Deci & Ryan 2002, Dörnyei 2009). However, second language learning motivation has primarily been examined by a newer sociolinguistics branch that focuses on the social contexts of the second language learners (Norton 2000, Pavlenko 2004, 2005, Blommaert 2005). My dissertation investigates the motivation for learning Danish by combining these two views on motivation. The purpose is to make use of the sociolinguistics’ acknowledgement of the significance of identities for second language learning without loosing the socialpsychologists’ focus on psychological needs.
The dissertation therefore consists of a theoretical discussion of the two diciplins and an analysis of my own data. The qualitative investigation is based on interviews with twelve adult learners of Danish including seven active participants and five ex-participants at a language centre in the Copenhagen area. The analysis shows that motivation is not particularly dependent on the actual language teaching and therefore discloses no significant difference between the motivation and active participant vs. ex-participant. On the contrary, the analysis confirms the theory that the social factors of the language learning and the learner’s feeling of personal desire to learn Danish is crucial for the motivation.
The motivation for learning Danish is dependent on some fundamental needs for human satisfaction and self-fulfillment and these needs are described within psychology by Deci & Ryan (2002) and within social theory by Honneth (2001, 2006). Their view points differ, however both lines of thought indicate that different factors influence the needs of every single learner positively as well as negatively. The learners who get all of their needs fulfilled are those who are the most motivated to learn and speak Danish. Motivation for second language learning has to be seen as a product of the individual’s feeling of self-esteem when speaking the second language and can be described on the basis of the fundamental needs. It is necessary to focus more on integration of second language learners outside the language school and, at the same time to focus on a new way of creating self-confident learners at the language school who dare to use the language in other social enviroments.