This presentation focuses on how foreign language study may be used to motivate hearing-impaired adolescents and to improve their English proficiency skills. Research on foreign language acquisition as it relates to self-concept development in hearing-impaired youth is reviewed, and a pilot project involving students at the Tennessee School for the Deaf in Knoxville is described. Through interviews, teacher observations, assessment of student progress, and a self-esteem inventory, 14 hearing-impaired 11th-grade students were evaluated to explore the relationship between their self-esteem and achievement motivation. Students from both an experimental and a control group participated in a computer-assisted vocabulary building program, and students in the experimental group also received Wortgefecht, a computerized German program that allowed students to learn basic grammar and syntax. Preliminary findings included: students in both groups had difficulty with the English vocabulary-building program; the teacher reported some change in the self-esteem (achievement motivation) of students in the experimental group; students in the experimental group scored higher on the German comprehension test than they did on the English; and students viewed their experiences with the computer-assisted German positively. (Includes 56 references.) (JDD)