Toward a Post-Integrative Theory of L2 Motivation: Legitimacy, Interpretive Authority, and a Centripetal-Neutral-Centrifugal Force-Field Model

초록

This theoretical paper reconceptualizes English learning motivation as a historically situated sociolinguistic construct involving legitimacy, community, and positive future imaginaries. Through a critical rereading of Gardner’s integrativeness, it argues that English learning motivation has often been organized by a centripetal orientation toward an imagined normative center sustained by native-speakerism, racialized speaker images, and credentialing and assessment infrastructures. The paper then reinterprets international posture as a neutralizing reorientation that weakens the assimilationist desire to target a bounded “native-speaker” community and reframes English as a plural, polycentric, and negotiable medium. However, such decentering remains partial because center-coded norms continue to operate in assessment and labor-market gatekeeping. Building on this tension, the paper proposes a centrifugal turn in twenty-first-century English learning motivation, shaped by platform-mediated English use and polycentric publics. In this turn, learners imagine English as a medium for outward participation, voice, and interpretive authority while mobilizing local repertoires as symbolic capital. Using South Korea as an illustrative case, the paper advances a post-integrative rationale for English learning and proposes a centripetal–neutral–centrifugal force-field model for future research.

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