ABSTRACT
In everyday speech the word ‘motivation’ usually refers to something solid and stable about a person, but this non-technical meaning of the word is at odds with a more scientific definition of motivation, which also includes a temporal, process-oriented element. This chapter discusses the non-static, dynamic nature of motivation by first investigating the role of the motivational context, that is, the fact that some aspects of motivation are not internal to the learner but are externally determined by the sociocultural set-up of the learner’s environment. This is followed by a focus on different timescales and multiple parallel goals, and the chapter concludes with an analysis of how all the inherent variability of the notion of motivation can be handled within the framework of complex dynamic systems theory.
