Robert C. Gardner is a Canadian psychologist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Western Ontario. For more than four decades, he was the dominant figure in L2 motivation research, and almost every subsequent framework, including Dörnyei's L2 Motivational Self System, defines itself in relation to the socio-educational model he built.
Gardner's model, developed with Wallace Lambert from the late 1950s, argued that motivation in SLA cannot be reduced to general academic motivation: attitudes toward the target-language community and desire for contact with it carry real weight. His Attitude/Motivation Test Battery (AMTB) is arguably the most widely used motivation instrument in applied linguistics, and integrative motivation is the single most debated construct the field has produced.