Abstract:

Literature in the area of Applied Linguistics has reiterated the need to expand methodological possibilities for research whose aim is to investigate unconscious content present in the motivation of students of English as a foreign language (Dörnyei, 2020). It has also been recommended the search for new ways to increase the validity of data analysis in qualitative approach research, such as those whose data generation methods are mainly narrative (Ushioda, 2011; 2013). Keeping that in mind, and also inspired by the pioneering initiative of Al-Hoorie (2016a; 2016b; 2017), we carried out a pilot study involving six English students at a language course in Brazil, in which we sought to associate the analysis of the results collected with an adapted version of the Test of Implicit Association (TAI), generated by the IATGEN software - designed, tested and made available by Carpenter et al. (2019), to the analysis of a learning narrative provided by each of the same six participants. Therefore, the objective of this article is to present the results of this pilot study, to defend the use of the IAT in similar investigative contexts.

Keywords:

Unconscious motivation, qualitative approach, Implicit Association Test, narratives, foreign language learning experiences.