Multilingualism and emergent selves: context, languages, and the anti-ought-to self

This study examines motivation and multilingualism using quantitative data from 468 language learners in China. More precisely, the point of inquiry was to investigate the language-specificity of the psychological aspects of self within the L2 Motivational Self System (L2MSS). The Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) with the L2 English data revealed a strong anti-ought-to self factor, along with the expected ideal and ought-to selves; however, the EFA for Japanese patterned similarly to English with an emergent anti-ought-to self, whereas this was not the case for French. These results indicate that the appearance of the anti-ought-to self emerges only when there is some sort of public opinion or controversy involved with the language in question, such as with English and Japanese in the current study. As for the separate EFA analyses for the ideal, ought-to, and anti-ought-to selves, the results suggest that participants have distinct English and L3 ideal selves, whereas this distinction did not exist for the ought-to and anti-ought-to selves. Implications of the sociopolitical aspects of languages in specific contexts, and directions for further research are provided.