Over the last few decades, an ever-increasing body of research in Second Language Acquisition has focused on learning motivation within a diachronic perspective, contributing to a dynamic shift in mainstream motivational research (Waninge, de Bot and Dörnyei, 2014). Directed Motivational Currents (DMC) represent a conceptual framework grounded on a series of process, vision and goal-oriented motivational theories, and it is deemed to be a potential device to motivate language learners (Dörnyei, Ibrahim & Muir, 2015). The actual application of this framework in the classroom context, however, has been subject to little investigation to date (Muir, 2016). In addition, although a great deal of research has been conducted on Task-Based Language Teaching’s (TBLT) pedagogical principles, and particularly on task definition and design, a limited amount of empirical studies focused on the relationship between these principles and the way they are linked to language motivation. The aim of my PhD project is to fill this gap by investigating student motivation in the Task-Based Language Teaching class within a DMC perspective, in order to verify the applicability of this novel conceptual framework both at a lesson and course level, to determine how teachers’ classroom practices affect learning motivation, and to delve into the relationship between motivation and language proficiency in the TBLT class.
