Make It Motivating!
Updated: Sep 7
An original Olo Library article
Make it motivating.
The teacher gets to work. Perhaps the questions become a game. There are teams, points, a timer and a scoreboard large enough for nobody to miss.
One learner wants to know whether there is a prize. Another contributes an eye-roll of such quality that it deserves points of its own.
Honestly. Nothing is good enough for these people.
Except, sometimes, it is.
Motivation can be clearly present and still surprisingly difficult to explain.
Teachers have seen it in learners of every age, including the ages said to be almost impossible to reach. Sometimes a class suddenly comes alive. Learners lean in, contribute, persist, ask to continue or return to something later. Sometimes, more importantly, something remains: greater confidence, more willingness to try or real progress in the language.
And yet we may not always know what made the difference.
One encounter catches hold of a learner. Another, which seemed just as promising, does not. Something works beautifully once and loses its power when we try it again. At other times, an ordinary activity develops a life we never planned for.
We often recognise motivation through its brightest signs: the raised hands, quick answers, praise and high-fives. But motivation may also look like a quiet learner returning to one difficult sentence, someone thinking intensely without speaking, or a learner continuing with work they do not enjoy because they have chosen what it matters for. We can see parts of what is happening. The pull itself, and where it may lead, are harder to read.
This article is an invitation to look underneath.
We will step inside a series of language-learning encounters and explore the different kinds of motivation at work within them. We will ask what draws learners in, what they may find once they are there, and why the same visible enthusiasm does not always lead to the same thing.
There is a substantial scientific theory that begins with precisely this puzzle. It can help us look at familiar moments again and see that actions which appear identical from the outside may be carrying very different inner meanings. Research will help us build that map. Then we will return to the encounters themselves: to what happens when a learner finds something in the language that matters and, perhaps, develops a different reason to return.
If we could hear the reason
A teacher has turned a vocabulary exercise into a competition. Learners are matching unfamiliar expressions to short situations, collecting points for correct answers and watching a running score. One final question could change the result. Hands go up. Groups whisper urgently. Someone objects when another team answers first.
If we could hear one sentence beneath all that movement, it might be:
I want our team to win.
Elsewhere, a learner opens a language app just before midnight. They are tired. Nothing in tonight's exercise particularly interests them, but the streak has lasted 214 days.
I have come this far. I am not letting the number disappear now.
Another learner watches ten minutes of a series they do not especially enjoy. The speech is too fast, the plot is not holding them and they pause more often than they would like. Still, they have decided to keep watching a little every day.
I don't enjoy this, but I know why I'm doing it. One day, I want to understand people without needing subtitles.
A fourth learner has replayed the same line of a song six times. There is no test on it. Nobody will know whether they understand it. They are trying to catch how a few ordinary words can hold anger, hurt and defiance all at once.
I need to know what these words are really saying.
A child reads a short story her tutor has written especially for her, filled with details drawn from the things she loves and the small jokes they share. She wants to know what happens next.
This feels as though it knows me. I want to see what happens.
In a primary classroom, a child discovers that familiar grammar can produce a sentence in which an elephant sleeps in the fridge. They make another one, even more ridiculous, and look up before they have finished saying it because they are already waiting for the class to laugh.
I want to make them laugh again.
An older learner uses a newly learnt structure to write something they have never quite said aloud. They change one word, then change it back. The sentence is grammatically careful, but that is no longer the only thing at stake.
I want someone to read this and know what I mean.
And one learner reaches the end of a long text whose subject was not especially interesting. They sit back, look at the page and feel a small shock of satisfaction.
I read all of that. I can actually do this now.
Some of these encounters happen in a lively classroom. Others happen quietly, with no teacher there to witness them. In each one, something keeps the learner there, but the reason is not the same.
Real reasons are rarely as neat as one scene and one inner sentence. The learner who wants the point may also love the puzzle. The learner protecting a streak may care deeply about the language the number represents. We will come back to that reality. For the moment, we are listening to the loudest voice in each encounter. Hearing the voices separately first will make it easier to recognise what happens when several of them speak at once.
The space between an action and its reason
Most of us have met the familiar distinction between extrinsic motivation, where the reason seems to come from outside the activity, and intrinsic motivation, where the activity is interesting or enjoyable in itself.
That distinction is useful, but it leaves a great deal of human experience crowded into the word extrinsic.
The learner who completes a task for a prize and the learner who completes it because they genuinely value what it will help them achieve are both acting for a result beyond the immediate pleasure of the task. Yet the two experiences do not feel the same. One may feel pushed. The other may feel fully willing. Somewhere between them is the learner driven by guilt, pride, fear of disappointing someone or the need to prove something about themselves.
Self-Determination Theory, or SDT, gives us a more precise way to hear these differences. Instead of asking only whether motivation is present, it asks what kind of motivation is moving the person, and how controlled or willing that movement feels.
Along the continuum, four voices are especially useful for the encounters we are exploring:
External regulation: I am doing this for the point, prize or result, or because of what will happen if I do not. The reason is tied to an outside reward, demand or consequence.
Introjected regulation: I have to prove that I am good at this. I would feel guilty, lazy or ashamed if I stopped. The pressure now speaks from inside, but it still feels like pressure.
Identified regulation: I may not enjoy this particular task, but I understand why it matters to me. The learner has recognised its value and willingly accepts the work.
Intrinsic motivation: I am doing this because I find it interesting, satisfying, enjoyable or personally absorbing in itself. The experience carries its own reason for continuing.
The full theory includes further distinctions, including amotivation and integrated regulation. These four give us enough detail for the journey we are making here.
They also prevent a rather unhelpful moral split between "good" and "bad" motivation. A prize can move behaviour. Approval can matter. A future goal can sustain difficult work. Valuable learning will not always be fascinating in the moment. What changes along the continuum is the learner's relationship with the reason: from feeling controlled by a demand, whether it comes from outside or has been taken inward, towards acting with greater willingness because the work is valued or enjoyable.
The encounters now begin to sound different.
The vocabulary competition brings an external result into the foreground: I want the point. The learner guarding a 214-day streak may be hearing introjected pressure: What would it say about me if I let this go? The learner tolerating the uninteresting series has identified a value beyond today's ten minutes. The song line has become absorbing in itself. The personalised story is absorbing too, and its pleasure is deeply personal. The learner who finished the long text does not yet fit as neatly into these four voices. They have met an experience we will return to in a moment: the felt pleasure of becoming capable.
We have not explained the whole person in any of these cases. We have learnt something more modest and more useful: the visible act of continuing can be moved by very different reasons.
Why the quality of motivation matters
These distinctions do more than give us better names for what learners may be feeling. A major meta-analysis, drawing on 344 samples and more than 223,000 learners, found that different kinds of motivation were associated with different patterns of persistence, achievement and wellbeing (Howard et al., 2021).
Intrinsic motivation was linked with learning success and wellbeing. Identified regulation was especially important for persistence: learners can continue with work that is not immediately enjoyable when they have willingly recognised its value. Introjected regulation was more complicated. Pride, guilt, fear of failure or the need to prove oneself could keep a learner working and orient effort towards performance, but this pressured persistence was also associated with poorer wellbeing. External regulation showed much less reliable links with sustained performance and was associated with lower wellbeing.
A recent meta-analysis focused specifically on second-language learning found positive relationships between achievement and both intrinsic motivation and identified regulation. Introjected and external regulation were not significantly related to achievement. The wellbeing picture appeared in language-specific form too: intrinsic and identified motivation were associated with lower language anxiety, while introjected and external regulation were associated with higher anxiety (Alamer et al., 2025).
These are associations, not destinies for individual learners. The findings do not say that externally motivated learners cannot learn, or that pressure never produces effort. They show why the quality of the reason matters for what effort can be sustained, what it may cost the learner and what remains available when the pressure disappears.
This makes introjected motivation particularly revealing. A learner may submit every task, revise late into the night and appear impressively committed while being driven by shame or fear. Persistence alone cannot tell us whether motivation is healthy, willing or likely to endure. Progress matters. So does the experience of the person making it.
What an encounter may allow a learner to feel
The continuum describes the quality of the learner's motivation. SDT gives us another set of ideas for understanding how that quality may be supported: the psychological needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness.
The names can sound abstract. The experiences are not.
Remember the older learner revising one deeply personal grammar sentence? There is a kind of ownership in being able to use the structure for what they actually want to say. Autonomy is that experience of willingness and authorship. It can grow through a meaningful choice, a convincing reason for difficult work or room to shape the language around one's own intention. Structure does not cancel autonomy. A tightly framed task may still leave space for the learner's mind and voice to matter.
Remember the learner looking back at the long text? The content did not suddenly become fascinating. What held the learner was the evidence on the page: something that once felt too large had become possible. Competence is this felt experience of becoming more capable. It grows when the challenge is real but reachable, when support makes an attempt possible and when the learner can notice what has changed.
And remember the child sending an absurd sentence across the room to make other children laugh, or the learner hoping someone will recognise themselves in a serious one? Relatedness lives in that human journey. The language is going somewhere. Someone is waiting to hear it, laugh with it, answer it or understand something through it. Relatedness can also appear when a song, story or voice brings a learner closer to a cultural world they long to enter.
Simply adding a choice, a success or a pair-work stage does not guarantee these experiences. A choice between two equally meaningless options may offer very little ownership. A task made artificially easy may not create the satisfaction of capability. A learner can feel lonely inside group work. The question is what the learner actually experiences, not what the lesson plan says we provided.
This is where the theory becomes hopeful without turning teachers into magicians.
We cannot order a learner to become curious. We cannot promise that a personally relevant topic will matter to everyone, or that a carefully judged challenge will always produce confidence. But when we see a little more of what may be happening beneath participation, we can create more possibilities for willingness, capability and connection to develop. These are invitations. Different learners may accept different ones, and some invitations will remain unanswered.
Why do these experiences matter to the continuum we have just met? Because autonomy, competence and relatedness can support the more willing, self-endorsed forms of motivation we have met, particularly identified regulation and intrinsic motivation. They may help a learner enjoy an experience for its own sake. They may also help the learner take a reason that began elsewhere and make it more genuinely their own. The listening task may still be hard work, but its value feels chosen rather than imposed. The new expression may begin as a curriculum requirement and become something the learner wants because it enables a real thought.
Now we have enough of the map to return to the untidy truth we acknowledged earlier.
When several voices speak together
Let us go back to the same encounters, slowly enough to notice what was there beside the loudest sentence.
In the vocabulary competition, the learner wants their team to win. That remains true. But perhaps they also enjoy detecting the tiny clue that separates two similar expressions. Their group listens while they explain the distinction. The final answer confirms that they have understood something difficult. In the same few minutes, there may be an external pull, intrinsic pleasure in the puzzle, growing competence and a sense that their understanding matters to other people.
The learner protecting the streak is responding to a number on a screen. On one night, that number may feel like an accusation. On another, it represents a promise they chose to keep, the pleasure of a tiny daily completion, or an identity that has begun to matter: I am someone who returns to this language. The same feature can carry different meanings at different times.
The learner persisting with the dull series knows why the work matters to them. That is identified motivation. Beside it may sit the pressure to behave like a "serious learner". Then one day they understand a joke without reading the subtitles. Capability flashes into view. A character becomes interesting. The task has not changed categories. More has simply become available inside it.
The learner absorbed in the song wants to understand the line because the words themselves have caught them. They may also feel closer to an artist, a culture or people they care about. They may value becoming someone who can meet the song without translation. And yes, they may be practising so they can impress their friends with a flawless performance. Intrinsic interest, personal value, connection and an external pull can all belong to the same song.
The personalised story may be enjoyable because of its plot, but some of its warmth comes from relationship. Someone noticed enough to write this particular story. Familiar details make the new language feel less distant. Each understood sentence also tells the learner that they are becoming a reader. Pleasure, relatedness and competence are difficult to pull apart because the learner did not experience them separately.
The child making nonsense sentences enjoys the language play and the laughter it creates. Their classmates' response makes them want to try again. Each successful sentence also demonstrates a growing command of familiar grammar. The personal grammar sentence travels in another emotional direction, but it too may offer ownership, competence and connection at once.
This is the layering we are interested in.
Some layers are reasons for acting: winning, personal value, enjoyment, approval. Some are features of the encounter: a strange image, a difficult but possible text, a choice that matters. Some are experiences that can support more willing, self-endorsed motivation: ownership (autonomy), growing capability (competence) and human connection (relatedness).
The learner meets them together. A score may bring them close enough to notice a language puzzle. Solving the puzzle may let them feel capable. Explaining it may make them significant to a group. The laughter following one absurd sentence may make the language itself worth touching again.
This gives us a richer possibility than searching for the one thing that will motivate everyone. A language encounter can offer several places where attention, value or pleasure might settle. No encounter will contain every possible invitation, and we cannot predict which one will matter to a particular learner. But one narrow pull no longer has to carry the whole weight of participation.
When a pull meets resistance
So far, the layers have mostly offered the learner reasons to move towards the encounter. Real learners may also be moving away from it at the same time.
A learner can value a future goal and find the present work painfully boring.
I know why this matters to me. I still cannot bear another twenty minutes of this task.
The identified reason has not disappeared. It may simply be unable to carry the boredom, exhaustion, excessive difficulty or lack of any meaningful control over the process. The learner still wants what the work may eventually make possible. Their engagement with this particular work collapses.
Another learner may be intrinsically interested in a paragraph and recoil from what visible interest might mean among their peers.
I want to answer. I do not want them to see me as someone who wants to answer.
Interest pulls towards the paragraph. The wish to protect an identity, avoid being labelled "goodie-goodie" or remain safely connected to the group pulls away from participation. The learner may continue thinking privately, answer carelessly on purpose or hide the interest altogether.
And a learner who genuinely wants to communicate may offer one careful sentence and meet a cold response.
The need for connection does more than remain unsatisfied here. It may be actively frustrated. There is a difference between an encounter that offers little warmth and one that makes a learner feel dismissed, excluded, incapable or exposed. Research on need frustration in language learning has associated these experiences with lower intrinsic motivation and poorer achievement.
I wanted you to understand this. I wish I had said nothing.
It is tempting to call such forces motivation killers. Sometimes they may gradually weaken a learner's reason for returning. But the immediate truth may be subtler: motivation can still be present while another force makes acting on it too costly.
This makes the learner's visible behaviour even harder to interpret.
What the teacher can see
Once several motives can coexist, the difference between motivation and engagement becomes important.
Motivation concerns what moves the learner and why. Engagement concerns how the learner is involved in the experience.
Researchers commonly look at several dimensions of engagement. Behavioural engagement may be visible in attention, participation, effort or completion. Emotional engagement concerns feelings such as interest, enjoyment, boredom, frustration or belonging. Cognitive engagement appears in the depth of thought, strategy and mental effort the learner brings to the work.
These dimensions may travel together, but they do not always do so.
A learner can complete every question while feeling bored and thinking very little. Another can sit quietly while working intensely to understand. A lively game may produce participation and delight while asking for only mechanical language work. A difficult reading may produce few raised hands while generating substantial private thought.
So They were engaged is an observation that needs another sentence.
How were they engaged? With what? What appeared to be moving them?
Even then, our answer is tentative. Teachers can see the hand going up, the answer being rewritten and the learner leaning towards a group. Motivation itself stays beneath the surface. We infer it from behaviour, from what learners tell us and from patterns that develop over time. Similar behaviour can carry different reasons. Very different behaviour can hide equally serious involvement.
The vocabulary competition may be a great success in behavioural terms. It may also produce joy, strategic thinking and careful attention to language. Or the points on the scoreboard may become so dominant that learners rush past the language to reach them. The scoreboard cannot tell us which experience occurred.
The pull that brings a learner in
External pulls can have a useful role.
A score can recruit attention. A timer can create movement. Praise may reassure a hesitant learner. A deadline can bring someone to a task they would otherwise keep postponing. Sometimes a learner needs to enter an experience before that experience has any chance to interest them.
We might call this entry engagement: the first movement that brings the learner into contact with the language encounter. The phrase is not another category in SDT. It helps us notice that engagement can sometimes come first. Motivation can lead learners to engage, but what they experience while engaged may also affect later interest, value and competence.
More than twenty years ago, a teacher used an ongoing scoreboard with groups of young learners. During a long worksheet, one child answered each question for the group. The others supported them if they became stuck, and the whole group earned a hand-drawn star for a correct answer. The stars helped the children look, listen and wait for what another group was doing.
Then came an activity with a picture full of nonsense.
The children were practising there is and there are, describing a scene where objects, people and animals appeared in absurd places. The stars may have gathered their attention at the beginning. But soon there was something else to look at. The children wanted to find the next ridiculous detail, produce the sentence and hear the class laugh. For a while, the score moved into the background.
The external system had opened the encounter. Inside it, the learners found humour, language play, competence and one another.
The story does not finish with a clean verdict. The scoreboard still framed the children's perception of English lessons so strongly that one child later told their mother, "English? Oh, we don't study. We're always playing the game."
Was that evidence of delight, or of dependence on the game? Had the stars hidden the learning, carried the learning, or both? We cannot know from the sentence alone. What we can see is that an external pull and genuine enjoyment of the language were able to coexist, and that attention first recruited by a score could be claimed by something else.
The vocabulary learner may first join today's task for a point. While there, they discover that they can distinguish two expressions, that they like the problem, or that their group needs their explanation. The point may still be the main reason they participate tomorrow. Nothing guarantees a transformation. But entry creates contact, and contact gives other reasons a chance to develop.
The important time frame is larger than one neat conversion inside a single lesson.
A learner does not necessarily enter for a prize at 10.05, discover intrinsic motivation at 10.17 and emerge permanently changed before the bell. More often, small experiences accumulate. Across later encounters, they become more capable of hearing a lyric, more willing to risk a sentence, more curious about why an expression works, or more convinced that the language belongs somewhere in their life.
The pull that brings a learner into today's encounter may not be the one that brings them back next month.
What happens afterwards?
Here the research introduces a less comfortable surprise.
Some practices used precisely because they make learners appear motivated in the moment have been associated with weaker motivation and behaviour afterwards.
Early studies that contributed to SDT examined what happened after rewards were removed. Under particular conditions, especially when an expected tangible reward was experienced as controlling, people became less likely to return freely to an activity they had previously found interesting. Later reviews found that the kind of reward, what it was given for and how the learner understood it all mattered. Language-learning research has also found negative relationships between controlled forms of motivation and engagement, and some experimental work has reported harm to learning performance.
The word afterwards changes how we judge success.
The reward may produce exactly the behaviour we requested while it is present. More answers appear. The task is completed. The scoreboard fills. If we measure only that moment, it worked.
But what happens in the next encounter, when the reward is absent?
This does not mean that every reward damages motivation, that competition should disappear or that a learner who loves winning lacks intrinsic motivation. They may passionately want the point and genuinely love the language problem. A reward or piece of feedback may also communicate useful information, recognition or growing competence rather than control. Its meaning matters.
The concern is dependence. If a learner engages only when the external device is present, the device may be producing movement without allowing another reason to grow. If every encounter says Do this for the points, learners may become highly practised at responding to points. That is not the same as becoming curious about language, valuing what it enables them to do or discovering pleasure in using it.
One scoreboard does not determine a learner's motivational future. The accumulation matters. Repeated encounters gradually shape what learners expect language learning to be, where they direct their attention and what they believe makes participation worthwhile.
So an activity has not failed merely because the learner entered for an external reason. Nor has it necessarily succeeded because they joined in. We need the longer view:
What brought the learner in?
What did they meet while they were there?
What reason, if any, might still be available when this pull disappears?
More places for motivation to develop
The practical work does not begin with a demand that every learner love every lesson. Some language work is difficult, repetitive or valuable mainly because of what it enables later. Teachers work inside real timetables, curricula and energy limits. An activity does not need to become a spectacle before it can matter.
We can begin by looking again at encounters we already create and asking whether the first pull is the only one available.
Suppose learners must practise a set of new expressions. The competition can stay. But the situations attached to those expressions might be funny, puzzling or close enough to life to be worth distinguishing. Learners might choose one expression for a real or invented moment and test whether another person understands what they intended. A point may still bring them in. Curiosity can make the language itself interesting (intrinsic motivation). A meaningful choice can give them some ownership (autonomy). Getting the distinction right can let them feel progress (competence). Another person's response can make the language travel somewhere (relatedness).
The teacher can help that last journey become real. When a learner says something, she can receive the message before moving to the language: ask the question the thought genuinely raises, show surprise, appreciation or amusement when she feels it, or let the learner see that their words have changed what another person now knows. The response does not need to be dramatic. It needs to be true. Your thought arrived. I understood it. It affected me. This is one way a teacher can offer relatedness directly, while gradually helping learners learn how to receive one another's meanings too.
Suppose a listening task matters but is not immediately enjoyable. Telling learners why it matters can help them connect the work to a purpose they accept (identified motivation). The future promise becomes more convincing when they can also detect a present change: a phrase they now catch without subtitles, the boundary between words that used to sound like one continuous stream, one speaker who has become easier to follow. Competence gives the reason evidence.
Suppose homework is usually completed because it will be checked (external regulation), or because a learner would feel guilty arriving without it (introjected regulation). That reason may remain. Within the homework, though, there might be one genuine decision: which example to investigate, which sentence to keep, which voice note to answer, which phrase deserves a place in a personal collection. The small space for autonomy does not guarantee intrinsic interest. It simply gives the learner's own attention somewhere to act.
Or suppose a learner brings a line from a song, a phrase from a game or a question about why someone said this rather than that. Making a little room for it need not derail the lesson. It can show that noticing language belongs to the learner too. Their interest is allowed to enter the classroom, meet other people and perhaps deepen.
The same three needs can therefore remain beside us as questions, directly connected to the continuum:
Autonomy: Is there room for the learner to act with some willingness or ownership? This can help an imposed reason become more genuinely their own.
Competence: Can the learner meet a real but reachable challenge and notice a change in what they understand or can do? Capability can sustain value and make continued engagement more likely.
Relatedness: Does the language connect the learner to another person, a community, a cultural world or something they care about? Connection can give the work personal meaning and may also make the experience enjoyable in itself.
These questions help us see where another possibility might be opened. The teacher is offering invitations rather than waving a motivational wand.
The teacher's reasons are in the room too
The teacher is not standing outside this continuum.
They too may be acting because something is required, observed or rewarded. They may feel pressure to keep a class visibly busy, to satisfy a school or to prove that they can make every learner happy. They may willingly teach a difficult activity because they value what it can build for learners. And they may be intrinsically drawn to the content, the intellectual pleasure of shaping a good question, the laughter produced by a nonsense picture or the unexpected direction of a learner's thought.
Several voices can speak together here as well.
A teacher may enjoy the process and care deeply about its value for learners. They may feel proud of doing something skilfully and also worry about how the lesson will be judged. They may begin an activity out of duty, then find themselves caught by the class's response. Their motivation can move, combine and change across encounters just as learners' motivation can.
The teacher's pleasure matters for what it is. It does not need to earn its place only by improving learner outcomes.
Enjoying the content, the making of the lesson, the use of language or the connection it opens with other human beings is part of the encounter. So is the quiet satisfaction of competence: I found a way to make this possible. So is autonomy: This carries something I believe about learning. So is relatedness: We met one another here.
That pleasure need not look like high energy. A teacher does not have to perform motivation into existence every day. Sometimes authentic presence is delight. Sometimes it is curiosity, absorption, a careful response or the small satisfaction of recognising that yesterday's impossible sentence has become possible today.
Learners may borrow some of the teacher's attention before they find their own. The movement can also travel back. A learner offers an unexpected thought, and the teacher becomes more interested. A class begins to listen differently, and an ordinary activity acquires another layer. The encounter is being made between them.
A reason to return
A motivating language encounter does not need to produce the same inner sentence in every learner.
One learner may enter for the points. Another may continue because the puzzle catches them. A third may discover that they can finally say something they have wanted to say. Someone else may enjoy all three.
The most autonomous reason does not have to be present at the beginning. Participation can sometimes create the conditions in which interest, value, competence and connection begin to grow. At other times, the external pull will do its work and nothing else will take hold. We cannot control the outcome or read a learner's inner world with certainty.
But we can stop asking one motivational device to do everything.
We can let an external invitation bring learners close without mistaking it for the whole encounter. We can leave room for thought, choice, growing capability, personal meaning and human connection. We can notice visible engagement while remaining curious about what it contains and what it may be building across time.
The questions that remain are simple enough to carry into a real lesson:
What might bring this learner into the encounter?
What might they find once they are there?
What could give them another reason to return?
We may never know exactly which layer mattered most.
But we can give more than one a chance.
Research mentioned
Alamer, A., Morin, A. J. S., Alrabai, F., & Alharfi, A. (2023). Introducing the Basic Psychological Needs Frustration in Second Language Scale (BPNF-L2): Examining its factor structure and effect on L2 motivation and achievement. Acta Psychologica, 240, 104021. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2023.104021
Alamer, A., Saeedy Robat, E., Elahi Shirvan, M., & Ryan, R. M. (2025). Self-Determination Theory and language learning: A multilevel meta-analysis. Educational Psychology Review, 37, 59. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-025-10038-y
Howard, J. L., Bureau, J. S., Guay, F., Chong, J. X. Y., & Ryan, R. M. (2021). Student motivation and associated outcomes: A meta-analysis from Self-Determination Theory. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 16(6), 1300–1323. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691620966789
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