The purpose of this study is to find out which type of factors that have an influence on the students' choice of the French language in high school in Sweden. The grade that the students get in the French course can give credit points that can be useful when the students must choose a university later. Therefore, this study focused on whether external and internal motivation had an impact on students' choice of the French course.

The study is using the theory of factors of internal or external motivation by Peter Gärdenfors to understand if the different factors have an impact on students’ choice of language in high school. The method that was used in this study was a quantitative method, with qualitative elements. A survey was created and handed out to the students in two classes in a high school in Sweden. The responses were collected and then analyzed to get a result.

The results shows that there are different factors that have an impact on students when they choose a language in high school. The results show that there are three factors that have a majority of the answers in the survey. The first factor is previous experience with the language, in form of previous success in the language. The second factor is a positive interest and attitude for the language. The last factor that has an impact is the creditpoint that student earn by studying FLE.