To motivate students in their foreign language class is an aim of many teachers. Choice and the support of learner autonomy has been shown to improve task motivation in the West, but would that be true of students in Japan ? The content of this presentation reviews survey research that assimilated task-based language learning with providing different levels of the choice of the topic of the task--none, some, and complete. In the experiments, the students would do a descriptive type of task, a narrative type of task, or a decision-making type of task, based on the research of Skehan and Foster. There were experimental sessions when the student could choose the topic of the task he or she would do and there were sessions when the student could not choose the topic of the task.

Surveys were designed to asses a student's task motivation, based on the research of Julkunen, as well as the student's feelings about the task and their conduct of it. These surveys were conducted after the task had been completed. This presentation will begin with an overview of the theories of choice and autonomy as motivating and how choice and autonomy are viewed in Asia and Japan. After that, the procedures for this research will be presented. Next, the results of survey research will be introduced. Here, the results of the surveys will be compared between the sessions when the students had no choice of the task topic and when they had a choice of the task topic. Lastly, the implications of the survey results in regards to second language acquisition and for teaching a foreign language will be discussed. Important for this part of the presentation is the theory that if the students are more motivated, then they will produce more output or do the task longer.