TY - JOUR A1 - Schmidtke-Bode, Karsten A1 - Kachel, Gregor T1 - Exploring the motivational antecedents of Nepalese learners of L2 English JF - International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching N2 - This paper is the first to examine the motivational disposition of Nepalese learners of L2 English. Based on an adapted version of the questionnaire in (Kormos, Judit & Kata Csizér. 2008. Age-related differences in motivation of learning English as a foreign language: Attitudes, selves, and motivated behavior. Language Learning 58. 327–355. Doi:10.1111/j.1467-9922.2008.00443.x.), we test the robustness and culture-specific applicability of well-known motivational antecedents to this learner population, and we investigate how the effects of these antecedents are mediated by the learners’ gender, age and regional aspects of the educational setting. In doing so, we offer novel ways of analyzing the data: Firstly, we employ random forests and conditional inference trees for assessing the relative importance of motivational antecedents. Secondly, we complement the traditional ‘scale-based approach’, which focuses on holistic constructs like the ‘Ideal L2 Self’, with an ‘item-based approach’ that highlights more specific components of such scales. The results are interpreted with reference to the L2 Motivational Self System (Dörnyei, Zoltán. 2005. The psychology of the language learner: Individual differences in second language acquisition. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum) and to previous studies on other Asian populations of L2 learners. KW - L2 motivation KW - L2 motivational self system KW - English KW - Nepal KW - random forests KW - Zweitsprache KW - Fremdsprachenlernen Y1 - 2018 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:525-26109 SN - 1613-4141 VL - 58 IS - 4 SP - 379 EP - 418 PB - De Gruyter Mouton CY - Berlin ER -