Working title: Swiss primary school children’s language learning motivation and its rela-tion to their language attitudes, stereotypes, and beliefs about language learning

The present dissertation project is a quantitative, 3-year longitudinal study (3rd – 5th grade) investigating the primary school children’s motivation to learn English and French and its relation to their language attitudes, their stereotypes of target language speakers, their perception of the ethnolinguistic vitality of the respective languages, as well as their beliefs about language learning. It aims at uncovering how motivated primary school children are to learn English and French and to what extent their motivation can be accounted for by their language attitudes, stereotypes and perception of the ethnolinguistic vitality of the two languages. Furthermore, the experimental design of the study sheds some new light on the question as to whether the introduction of English as the first FL has a negative motivational impact on subsequent learning of French.