A study of motivation in African American and Caucasian advanced foreign language students

This study was designed to examine and compare the attitudes and motivations of African American and Caucasian (Bowers, 1996) advanced foreign language learners.;The responses of these two groups were examined and compared using Gardner's Attitude/Motivation Test Battery (1985). Because I was seeking differences as well as similarities in attitudes and motivation toward foreign language study, the two groups were examined separately in the following areas: (1) Internal motivation which consists of (1a) Attitudes toward native speakers of the target language, (1b) General interest in foreign language, and (1c) Integrative orientation; (2) External orientation; (3) Goal focus motivation which consists of: (3a) Motivational intensity, (3b) Desire to learn a specific foreign language, (3c) Attitudes toward learning foreign languages.;The respondents were 259 African American advanced foreign language students at seven predominantly Black colleges and 197 Caucasian advanced foreign language students at seven predominantly White colleges across the United States. Cluster sampling was used to select pairs of universities with each member of the pair, one Black and one White being in approximately the same geographic area. All students were in foreign language classes above the 202 or sophomore college level.;The results showed that there were statistically significant differences in all areas except for integrative orientation and external orientation. Both African American and Caucasian students scored almost the same in these two areas. It appears that the advanced college foreign language learners showed high external and integrative orientation. There is also an extremely high correlation between the mean internal motivation score and mean goal focus motivation score for the African American participants. The correlation of.48493 between the internal motivation score and goal focus motivation score for Caucasian, while statistically significant, is much weaker.