The subject
Modern languages (usually Spanish, French or German as a third language), is the only subject in the Swedish compulsory school that you can choose not to study and instead choose to study extra Swedish or English, something that historically has led to a high degree of students who choose to drop out.
The purpose of this study is to investigate the factors that affect the students’ motivation to continue studying the language. In order to understand the results from the survey carried out in this study I will use Bourdieu’s theory of capital as well as motivational theories as compiled by Stensmo.
The results from this study show that the majority of the students who choose to continue to study Spanish do so to acquire grades which are then used to apply to upper secondary schools. This can be interpreted as the students being motivated by external motivation, meaning that the grades are more important than gaining actual skills in the target language. Furthermore the acquisition of high grades can be viewed as educational capital in accordance with Bourdieu’s theory of capital.