The learning and acquisition of a second and foreign language (L2)cannot take place unless the educational environment affords sufficient inspiration and support to stimulate learners' sustained learning motivation (Dörnyei & Muir, 2019), as evident in past decades of motivation research. Previous research has also revealed that L2 motivation is a dynamic construct, malleable contingent upon spatial-temporal contexts, and that, due to its multifaceted nature, learners' motivation often changes in a complicated manner, rather than showing a mere increase or decrease in motivation levels (Papi & Hiver, 2020; Waninge, Dörnyei, & de Bot, 2014). Embracing this complex and dynamic view of L2 motivation, the present study is intended to further scrutinize whether there exist patterned outcomes of L2 motivation that transcend the motivational complexity and dynamics, how the motivation patterns (if any) are constructed from a set of different components, and how the patterns operate and function over time.
Our motivation to do so is three-fold: first, L2 motivation research is currently undergoing a shift in paradigm, starting to explore motivational patterns (also as motivation profiles) configured by distinct combinations of different motivational components. By taking such a holistic approach, the interconnectedness of these components is increasingly revealed, shedding important light on how different motivational components work together to shape learners' motivated behaviors and jointly serve as "functionally useful units" in the language learning process (Chan, Dörnyei, & Henry, 2015, p. 239; see also Dörnyei, 2019; Papi & Hiver, 2020). Second, methodological improvement and innovation in line with this paradigm-shifting are also occurring in the field (Al-Hoorie, Oga-Baldwin et al., 2022). New methods such as growth mixture modeling (GMM) have been adopted to identify salient motivation trajectories (i.e., showing distinct developmental trends) (Authors, 2022), which increase the detail and understanding of how language learners' motivation develops and changes over time. Third and also of pedagogical importance, the identification of typical motivational patterns and the establishment of multivariate motivation profiles can be capitalized for developing classroom intervention techniques (Morin, Arens, & Marsh, 2016).
The present study, guided by a holistic person-centred perspective, applies a latent transition analysis (LTA) method to identify distinct, but meaningfully interpretable, configurations of a set of motivational components as motivation profiles among 125 Chinese EFL learners, and examine the within-sample stability and within-person stability of thesemotivation profiles over a period of five months. In doing so, the study contributes to theory and research in different ways. First, it generates new insights into the nature and mechanism of learner motivation with the identification of distinct motivation profiles which meaningfully accommodate the adaptive interactions of different motives. More importantly, it addresses a less-touched issue regarding the stability of the motivation profiles established, focusing on both the within-person stability and the within-sample stability (Gillet, Morin, & Reeve, 2017). A systematic examination of the stability of the motivation profiles can help to clarify whether these profiles reflect some relatively stable phenomena that can be used to guide in-class interventions.
