Social Representations and Learning Motivation

The so called ‘social representations’ have long occupied enormous interest in scholars’ concern mainly in the field of language education. The research in this particular branch of social psychology has made it possible to understand that the attitudes and perception of students towards a language studied within a given society play a significant role in their desire to learn it or in their partial refusal of it or even in their rejection of that language. This article mainly examines the impact of social representations on students’ motivation for learning Italian in a context where several foreign languages are in competition. The research was undertaken in Moulay Abdellah High School in Rabat, adopting a quantitative and qualitative methodology to analyse students’ linguistic attitudes towards Italian. The research’s results proved, in compliance with previous literature, that social representations do define the de facto status of Italian in the Moroccan educational system.