292 - A practical guide to your ideal Mandarin self: Build motivation that lasts

0:00Motivation is not a personality trait you either have or lack, it's a system you can design. Picture your future Mandarin self, make studying sustainable, and let's steady action close the gap. Hello and welcome to the Hacking Chinese Podcast. In this week's episode we are going to talk about a motivation. This is a topic I have covered before on the podcast, namely in episode 188, where we talked about self-determination theory and how you can use that to boost your motivation to learn Mandarin. Motivation is typically not something we think too much about when we set out, because we have a strong motivation to learn, and when things are going well, motivation isn't really perceived to be a problem. But the longer we study, the more important it becomes to sustain this motivation. When you started learning Mandarin, you presumably did so for a reason, and this is often enough to power students through the initial stages of learning.

1:02But the longer you study Chinese, the weaker that reason might be, or it might even become irrelevant after a while. If you started learning Chinese because you thought it was cool, is it really as cool when you have been studying for months or years? Is that enough to keep you going? Or what if your goal is distant and hard to achieve? For example, if you want to be able to read news or perhaps novels in Chinese, this will at the very least take a few years, and you can't take for granted that a distant goal will power your learning in everyday situations. The question of why people do the things they do, or sometimes why we fail to do things we say that we want to do, is of course an important one in psychology, and there are several frameworks available to help us explain why we sometimes feel motivated, and sometimes we lose motivation, and some people even quit learning. I have mentioned self-determination theory already, it has a lot of empirical research backing it up, and it can also be directly applicable to language learning. But like I said, check out episode 188 for more about that.

2:05In this week's episode, we're going to talk about a different framework developed by Zoltan Dodeñe called the L2 Motivational Self System, or L2 MSS, and L2 here stands for second language, which is important because a theory like self-determination theory is about human motivation in general, and even though people have applied it to language learning, and there's plenty of research about that specifically, the general framework is still general, whereas the L2 MSS is specifically about learning languages. Dodeñe's theory is one that relies on identity and visions of future self to make language learning meaningful and motivating, and the ultimate goal of this episode then is to help you understand your own motivation so you can learn more in the long run. For those of you who want more than that, there is a list of references on further reading in the written article on hacking Chinese. So the L2 Motivational Self System has three components, and we're going to talk about them in turn. The first one is called ideal L2 self, so this is essentially a future version of you

3:07where you use Mandarin with confidence in some kind of real life situation that matters to you. Next we have O2L2 self, so this represents the requirements and expectations you feel from others, such as courses, employers, family or friends. Then finally the third component is learning experience, and this is essentially everything else, so for example who your teacher is, what learning materials you use, other people you encounter who help you along the road, and so on. The core idea here is to discuss different possible selves and see how we can move between them, and this theory was developed by Higgins and Marcus and Norris and others from the 1980s and onwards. Dornier then continued this research and applied it to language learning and teaching. So the core idea here is that we have different selves, some of them are possible selves because they are in the future, and some are perceived selves, so for example how we regard ourselves in the moment, and the goal then is to find a path from who we are now to, who we want

4:09to become. If you listened to that earlier episode about self-determination theory, I talked about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, so motivation that comes from you, which would be aligned with the ideal L2 self, how you regard yourself as an ideal user of Mandarin in the future, but we also have extrinsic motivation, which comes from other people and the situation around you, and this is then the O2L2 self, so this is requirements from not yourself, but from other people, institutions, etc. As we discussed in that episode as well, extrinsic motivation can sometimes be negative, and so having lots of pressure and requirements, etc. and essentially having goals you don't own yourself and don't have control over, can have negative impacts on your learning. So motivation is not just something you have or you don't have, there are many different kinds of motivation, and simply adding up so one kind of motivation doesn't automatically lead to another. For more about this, please check out episode 188, as mentioned.

5:10So let's talk about the three components in the Nye's theory here then in more detail, and so the first one then is ideal L2 self, and this is the core, and it's not a catchy phrase like being fluent in Mandarin, nor is it a concrete goal like passing HSK9. Instead it's a vivid vision that carries some kind of emotional weight, a mental movie if you will, where you use Mandarin successfully in a situation that matters to you. So to be more concrete, here are a few examples. I travel around Taiwan and handle buying tickets, finding a place to stay, and asking for directions without switching to English. I connect with the Mandarin speaking relative by chatting in Mandarin with them about what I have done today. I hold a short presentation in Mandarin on my research topic, then answer to follow-up questions from the audience. I negotiate delivery dates with a supplier on a video call in Mandarin and confirm the outcome in a short WeChat message. And finally, I watch a Chinese drama or movie without subtitles and still understand enough to enjoy the show.

6:12As mentioned, these should also have some kind of emotional weight, which I didn't try to stress in the examples because that's obviously highly individual. Some key questions to ask yourself is, what does this vision mean for you? How does it make you feel? And how does it connect to what you value in life? Whatever your vision is, it's something fairly long-term, it's not something you can do this week or even this month, although there is no definition of exactly how long-term it needs to be. As with any long-term goal, you need to see a path from where you are now to where you want to be, and if you don't do that, it won't feel realistic and you don't own this goal or you can't see yourself achieving this vision. To avoid this problem, you should analyze your vision and see what kind of skills and abilities it requires, and then see how you can work towards those on a smaller scale. Another great way to motivate yourself is to find people who have done what you are trying to do, or at least something similar. What did they do to achieve their goals? How did they do it?

7:12And what's their story like? And again, it might not be the same as yours, but there are other people who have learned Mandarin before you did, and so looking to these people can be motivating and inspiring. And of course, I hope that you find hacking Chinese to be such an example, even if the way I learned is not necessarily similar to what you are doing. Or more about how I learned Chinese, you can check out episode 128. It's also important to keep your vision alive. If you don't revisit it or think about it, it is going to fade and then it can't really have any motivational effects. So when you have figured out what your ideal L2SELF is and written it down, put this somewhere visible, maybe next to your computer or somewhere where you see it often. This will help you stay motivated in your day-to-day studying, and if you feel like giving up, that's a good idea to think about why you are doing all these things in the first place. Now that we have looked at the ideal L2SELF, it's time to look at the OR2L2SELF. One way of splitting this into ideal versus OR2L2SELF is that I think most people have an

8:14intuitive grasp that the ideal version is good in some way, whereas the OR2 version is not necessarily a good thing. Sure we have things we ought to do and if we do for that reason, but if we have too much pressure, this can also have an opposite effect. Especially if we're talking about a very long-term project such as learning Chinese. This has also been verified experimentally, so having lots of external motivation doesn't mean you learn more in the language you're studying, but it does correlate with language anxiety, meaning that people usually stress out more if they have more external pressures, which I think is somewhat self-evident. Still, I think it's important to calibrate your OR2L2SELF and make sure that the extrinsic motivation you have works for you, or at least try to minimize the negative kind of external motivation. Again, this is a good example of the fact that you can have many different types of motivation, and sometimes having more of a certain kind isn't good for you. A concrete way to make external motivation more internal is to reframe it as something

9:15positive instead of something negative, and I don't mean positive as in good here or negative as in bad, but instead to different kinds of goals. So first we have avoidance goals, and these are things you don't want to do, and are therefore negatively framed. So for example, I want to avoid a bad grade, disappointing my family, or perhaps letting my boss down. These can fairly easily be re-framed into approach goals, which are positive. So for example, we could say I want to get a good grade instead of avoiding a bad grade, or I want to make my family proud or happy instead of letting them down, and the same goes for the boss then. You want to impress them or make them think highly of you, rather than avoiding letting them down. So in practical terms, these of course mean the same thing, but framing really does matter and having approach goals has been shown to be more beneficial for motivation than having a avoidance goals. And so this is one thing you can do to move goals from being purely extrinsic to being more intrinsic.

10:15And usually we can't just get rid of these. For example, if you're in a course, you can't just get rid of grades if you need the grades to pass the course, and that is important, but you can frame the grade in a positive manner. This brings us to the third component in the Rene's framework, which is learning experience. This is a miscellaneous category that contains a lot, because if you want this framework to cover everything, well, we have the IL2 selves, the ideal L2 self and the O2L2 self, but that obviously doesn't cover a lot of things. For example, who your teacher is, how they teach you, how you learn what methods you use, the learning materials you engage with, the people you have around you, such as native speakers, friends, classmates, and so on. All these things are of course very important for not just your motivation, but how much Chinese you learn. And in this theory, then they are all covered by learning experience. Because learning experience covers so much, I'm not going to discuss it here in detail. I mean, you could argue that most things are written on hacking Chinese are about learning

11:18experience, and it can be argued that the unique contribution by Dernier here is not this component, but rather the ideal L2 self and the O2L2 self. Before we wrap up this episode, I want to say a few things. What research says about the L2 motivational self system, and again, the references can be found at the bottom of the written article on hacking Chinese. A large meta analysis by Alhury 2018 found that the ideal L2 self correlates strongly with intended effort, so that is essentially the students self reported willingness to invest time and energy into learning the language. The links to O2L2 self and the L2 learning experience were moderate. Of course, what students say that they intend to do is not the same as what they do, and their motivation to learn is also maybe not directly correlated to how much they actually learn, because that can be related to many other things. For example, you can have a very strong motivation to learn, but if you don't have time, money, or resources, or you can't find people to talk to, etc.

12:20This still doesn't matter, you won't learn in Chinese anyway. The meta analysis I mentioned earlier also examined the link between the components of the L2 motivational self system and language proficiency, so what they actually ended up learning, not what they intended to do. This is really hard to measure, and you can read the study if you want to know more details, but measuring how much people learn is hard and making long-term studies where you follow up and see how much people actually do over years is also practically very hard. Overall, the results showed much weaker correlation and even a negative correlation with O2L2 self. The main takeaway for us here I think is that having a strong ideal L2 self can be correlated with learning more, but we should be careful before we draw too many conclusions, and also the O2L2 self can, as I mentioned earlier, actually have a negative correlation with learning the language. This result doesn't mean much on its own, you would need to break down O2 into many, many

13:22different kinds of motivation, because it seems obvious, for example, that if you have a strong incentive to learn, but the only reason you're learning is that somebody forces you to do it. This is indeed a strong motivation, but it's also understandable if that doesn't lead to a long-term attainment, or even short-term if people pressure you too much. On the other hand, we all know that a little bit of friendly competition or pressure from the outside can increase motivation, and so it doesn't mean we should never have any kind of O2 motivation or think about our O2 selves, but we need to calibrate it as I said earlier. So to summarize, Dornier's L2 motivational self system has three components, the ideal L2 self, which is what you want to achieve, a vision of a future self using Mandarin. We have the O2L2 self, which is what you should do based on expectations and requirements from people around you, and then we also have the L2 language experience. And to make use of this as a learner of Mandarin, you should make sure that your ideal L2 self

14:23is something you're aware of, what are you going to use Chinese for, what will that make you feel like, what will it enable you to do, and so on. You should also calibrate your O2L2 self, as I just said, and then try to optimize your L2 learning experience, which is basically what the rest of hacking Chinese is about. Once you have an ideal L2 self, vividly in mind, you need to break it down into more practical actions and see what you can do right now to move from where you are now towards your ideal Mandarin self. Thank you for tuning in to the hacking Chinese podcast. If you like this episode, please share it. More information and inspiration about learning and teaching Chinese can be found at hackingchines.com. See you in the next episode, and until then, good luck with your studies.