Abstrakt
In recent years, the need for English as a foreign language (EFL) education in schools has become a priority worldwide. The aim of our paper is to investigate which countries currently focus on researching motivation to learn EFL and what potential reasons are behind the focus.
We performed a topic search of the keywords "EFL" and "motivation" in the Web of Science database for 2020. In total, we found 61 Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) articles.
Asia prevails, especially Eastern Asian Chinese speaking regions (Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong). Policies in Asian regions such as China and Taiwan highly support EFL.
There is the aim to develop Taiwan into a "bilingual nation". Likewise, the European Union promotes the establishment of the so-called European Education Area within which studying and training should be accessible and profitable for people living in the EU.
Spain remains the European country with the highest number of EFL motivation publications. There were only a few papers from the Americas.
In South America, we see evidence of the beginnings of a CLIL push, which has the potential to lead to expanded EFL motivation research in these previously under researched areas.