Saudi pilots, World Englishes, motivation, Second Language Acquisition
There are around more than 6809 languages spoken in the world, with English enjoying a highly
prominent position among them (Anderson, 2004). Throughout the world, many nations support their
citizens in learning English to communicate on a global scale, yet this support is very uneven (Crystal,
2012). Language teachers and scholars are typically interested in finding innovative and proven
methods to motivate and engage learners in acquiring English as a second or other language (Sharples
et al., 2016). Central to many, if not all, pedagogies is the notion of motivation. Motivation is both a tool
and a framework which greatly helps language professionals in enhancing the language learning
process (Gardner, 2001). Indeed, it is considered by many to be one of the most essential elements in
learning a target language (Dörnyei, 2018; Dörnyei, Henry, & Muir, 2015). One of the purposes of
conducting our research is to identify the role of motivation and other factors in foreign language
learning, in this case, English. The main researcher has already adopted and adapted the theoretical
framework of Dörnyei’s (2009) theory of the L2 motivation self-system to determine the motivation aims
of a select and unique cohort of Saudi student military pilots who are learning English. This paper will
explore the role of motivation in the context of Saudi Arabia where a number of other important factors
are also at work. These factors include cultural norms as well as certain socio-economic and indeed
political issues, which come to the fore. The reported data emerges from trainee aviation pilots at the
military school in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia and with that, we aim to show how these students
are unique in their English language acquisition. These trainees migrate from an inherent necessity to
communicate and perform with their English lingua franca in a global arena, to achieving a distinctive
and matchless status among their Saudi fellow citizens. In achieving such a near-peerless position, we
will argue how this extends the notion of ‘motivation’ in SLA and ultimately reveals the cultural impact
(Jenkins, 2014) and exceptionality of the aviation culture of Saudi pilots and trainee pilots. Their special
status certainly does not exist within the traditional Inner and Outer Circles of world Englishes (Belaid,
2015), as we will show, because these trainees challenge and add to our understanding of the diverse
cultural and sociolinguistic contexts in which they learn and function.