Motivation
Where does it come from? Where does it go?
Where does it come from? Where does it go?
by
Andrew Littlejohn, November 2001
This
article was originally published in ENGLISH TEACHING professional, Issue 19, March 2001. ©
Copyright Andrew Littlejohn. Further articles and resources by Andrew Littlejohn are available at www.AndrewLittlejohn.net
Copyright Andrew Littlejohn. Further articles and resources by Andrew Littlejohn are available at www.AndrewLittlejohn.net
In recent years, I
have had the privilege to visit many classes around the world, to talk to teachers
and sit in on their lessons. I remember
very clearly one experience in particular which started me thinking about the
whole question of motivation.
I was visiting a
secondary school, and my first visit was to a first year class of 11-12 year
olds, early in their school year. As
soon as you opened the door, you could feel and see the motivation to learn in
these students. Big, bright eyes, and
smiles, eager to show the visitor what they had learned. They had been looking forward to the visit by
‘the Englishman’ and now the moment had arrived. The bubbling energy of these students was
overwhelming, and so too was their desire to learn English.
Next lesson, I went
a little further along the corridor to visit a second year class, a year
older. Here, the tone was very different
– more purposeful but more subdued with none of the spark that I had seen just
before. Their eyes no longer had a
twinkle and the smiles were now replaced by a somewhat expressionless look on
some students. We had a pleasant
encounter, and they read short pieces of their work to me but the overall tone
was rather polite.
Next, I visited a
third year class, and here I found a quite different atmosphere. At front of the class, there were a few
students who were clearly interested in the visit by ‘the Englishman’. We
talked about the things they liked and disliked in learning English and their
interests. It was, however, always the
same students who talked and most of the students remained silent
throughout. More significantly, there
were two students who clearly couldn’t care less – or so it appeared. One of them, sitting at the back of the
class, had his feet on the edge of his desk, not a book, a pen or a piece of
paper near him. He was removing what
looked like motor oil from his nails.
Every so often he would shout something out to another student, and
receive a glare from the teacher. The
other student, also at the back, was evidentially asleep, with his head flopped
over his desk, and no sign of any school equipment near him.
Many teachers, I am
sure, will recognise the scenarios here.
They are, in fact, situations that I have since seen time and time again
in my visits to schools. Many teachers,
too, will also recognise the sketch of the ‘couldn’t care less – don’t want to
learn’ students. The most striking thing for me, however, was the transition
from the 1st year students –all seemingly eager and energetic- to
the wide differences amongst the 3rd year class, with some students
now apparently completely negative about their learning. Assuming that the 3rd year class
had once been like the 1st year class, what had happened in the
intervening three years? Where did the
students’ initial motivation come from? And where did it go?
Sources
of motivation
It would be
difficult, if not impossible, to point to a single factor which would account
for the apparent changing levels of motivation and involvement that I had
witnessed. As all teachers know, and
as Marion Williams in an earlier article (ETP, Issue 13) has explained, there
are many, many factors which affect students’ commitment to study. Many things
– perhaps most – are beyond our control as language teachers, and fall outside
the confines of the few lessons that we have with them in a week. Home background, physical tiredness, events
in their personal life, health, previous educational experience, personality
and the onset of adolescence, are just some of the factors that can affect how
individual students appear to us in our classes. Nevertheless, I believe that in many cases,
the explanation of why the smile disappears from the faces of some students –
whatever their age - may indeed lie in their experience of their English
classes – in short, in how their classes are organised.
In very general terms,
educational psychologists point to three major sources of motivation in
learning (Fisher, 1990). Simply put,
these are:
1
The
learner’s natural interest: intrinsic
satisfaction
2
The
teacher/institution/employment: extrinsic reward
3
Success in the task: combining satisfaction
and reward
Intrinsic satisfaction
Sad
though it may be, we must, I believe, recognise that only a relatively small
number of students get a sense of intrinsic satisfaction from learning
English. For the vast majority of
people, language is not, in itself, very interesting, and it is unlikely
to spark and, still less, to sustain motivation. For some older learners, the satisfaction of
learning and using a foreign language may be connected to what Gardener (1985)
has called an ‘integrative motivation’ – a desire to identify with the culture
of the foreign language – but this is not widespread and it is not likely to be
the case with younger learners. Some
teachers of younger students endeavour to relate to what they see as their
pupils’ sense of intrinsic satisfaction by using games, songs and puzzles in
the class. Often these have a positive
impact in raising the motivation of the pupils – but the effect is usually
temporary, and once they return to normal classroom work, the effect wears
off. In general, then, the learner’s
natural interest is not, therefore, something which we can rely on to generate
sustained motivation in language learning.
Extrinsic rewards
Aware of
these facts, many teachers, and indeed whole educational systems, turn to a
second source of motivation, extrinsic reward, and its opposite, extrinsic
punishment, as a means of motivating
students. In the classroom, for example,
teachers may ‘reward’ students with good marks, or, in effect, punish other
students with low marks. ‘Better’
students may be rewarded by being given more advanced work to do, or by being
placed in a higher level group, which increases their sense of self-worth. The principal problem in this approach,
however, is that rewards only lead to sustained motivation if you actually get
them. For the failing student, unlikely
to get rewards, it does not take long to work out that it is always someone
else who gets the rewards – no matter how hard he or she works. In this case, the reward system itself can be
demotivating for the weaker students. The increase in the motivation of the
better students is more or less proportional to the decrease in motivation of
the weaker students.
Success in the task
While teachers
and school systems have drawn on both of the first two sources of motivation,
the third source is perhaps under-exploited in language teaching. This is the simple fact of success,
and the effect that this has on our view of what we do. As human beings, we generally like what we do
well, and are therefore more likely to do it again, and put in more effort.
If we
put in more effort, we generally get better, and so this sustains our
motivation. Feelings of being able to do something and feelings of sustained
motivation can therefore be linked into an upward spiral which causes us to
commit ourselves to what are we doing and to improve.
Unfortunately for
many students, this spiralrelationship between motivation and ability can often
function in reverse. Few people like to fail and we generallyavoid
circumstances in which we anticipate failure. In the classroom, this can mean
that studentswho develop an image of themselves as ‘no good at English’ will
simply avoidsituations which tell them what they already know – that they
aren’t any good atEnglish. Feelings of
failure,particularly early on in a student’s school career, can therefore lead
to adownward spiral of a self- perception of low ability – low motivation –
loweffort – low achievement – low motivation – low achievement, and so on. It is the existence of these upward
anddownward spirals in the motivation-ability relationship that explain a
situationcommonly found by teachers. In manyclasses where there are differing
levels of student ability, the gap between the‘weaker’ students and the
‘stronger’ students appears to get wider and widerover time, as some students
thrive in an upward spiral, whilst other studentsactually deteriorate in a
downward spiral.
The attempt by some
students to avoid recurring failuresuggests that we need to rethink some of the
beliefs that we may have aboutthem. While it may be true that thestudents with
their feet on the desk at the back of the class really aren’tinterested in
learning, it may equally be true that what they are actuallytrying to do is to
avoid repeated failure – by pretending that they don’tcare. It is their sense
of self-esteemthat is at stake here. By pretendingthat they aren’t interested
and don’t want to learn, they can protectthemselvesfrom seeingthemselvesas
failure. Such extreme displays of disinterest orrejection of learning are
probably at the bottom end of a downwardmotivation-ability spiral. For
manystudents, the spiral will have begun long before, as they learned to
seethemselves as failures, and then began to engage in various kinds of
avoidancestrategies – sitting at the back of the class, choosing a seat where
theywouldn’t be noticed, misbehaving, pretending illnesses at crucial moments
suchas tests, and blaming failure on the teacher or the school or
otherstudents.
Self
esteem andconfidence
What all this
points to, I think, is that we shouldn’tunderestimate the importance of
self-esteem and a sense of competence inlanguage learning as crucial factors
affecting motivation. For the failing student, in particular, it isimportant
that we try to develop their sense of success and a feeling that theycando
something, rather than a feeling than they can’t.
In practical terms,
this means that we need to besensitive to the psychology of language learning.
When we plan a lesson, devise a test, or usea particular type of exercise, we
need to ask ourselves a very importantquestion:how will the weaker students
feel if they can’t do this? Let me
give an example. One of the commonest exercises used inlanguage classrooms is
the gap-fill. This is a text with every 7thorso word missing, which
the students have to supply. Confident, motivated students who have ahistory of
success are likely to approach such exercises feeling that they havedone these
exercises before and, as they have usually done well, they willprobably be able
to do this one too. And, if they do complete the exercise successfully they
will have infront of them confirmation of what they already knew, and their
confidence andmotivation are renewed again.
Weakerstudents, however, may have exactly the opposite experience.
Previous failuremay create a lack of confidence as they approach the task, and
if they find thatthey can only complete one or two of the gaps correctly, then
once again theyare presented with a picture of what theycan’tdo – and so
the spiralrelationship of motivation-ability takes another step downward.
I do not want to
suggest by this that we should neveruse gap-fill exercises. Usedappropriately,
they can serve a very useful purpose. The basic point I wish to make, however,
isthat there is a psychology involved in everything we do in the classroom,
andthat this is concerned with the students’ feelings of success/failure,
high/lowself-esteem, high/low confidence and this has a direct impact
onmotivation. Viewed in this way, we maybe able to understand some of the
reasons why, over time, motivation may fail,and explain the differences in the
three classrooms I described at the beginningof this article. It suggests that,
wherewe see students beginning to fail and beginning to lose motivation, one
route torepairing the situation may lie in choosing tasks which we believe the
studentscando, in order to develop a sense of competence and confidence.
It also suggests that all students need tofeel a sense of progress and that
their efforts actually lead to results.
Feedback
One important
element in shaping the students’ view ofthemselves is the feedback that we give
them. Research has shown that even very
young children, in their first years atschool, able to identify who the
‘clever’ pupils are and who the ‘not veryclever’ pupils are. They do this
bymonitoring the teacher’s oral feedback, and develop a fairly clear picture
ofwhere they stand in the classroom league table. The importance of this in
shaping the pupils’ self-esteem, feelings ofcompetence and motivation cannot be
underestimated. It suggests that we need to be very carefulabout how we give
feedback, who gets praise and who doesn’t. It also suggests that we need to be
carefulabout the type of feedback that we give students, and whether it
recognises andvalues effort, content, ideas and potential.
To end this short
article, I have given a list of somepractical suggestions which you may like to
experiment with, but you will findmore examples and practical accounts in Breen
and Littlejohn, 2000. There is no‘magic formula’ for sustaining motivation in
learning. As the first point in the list of ideas says,we need to experiment
and take risks. The starting point, however, needs to be to try and understandwhysome
students are not motivated and not simply blame them for not beinginterested.
If we start from theassumption, which I believe is true, that all human beings
in the rightcircumstances are naturally motivated to learn, we need to ask
ourselves:where does that motivation go?
Bibliography
Breen
M. P. andLittlejohn, A. P. 2000.Classroom Decision-Making. Cambridge
University Press.
Fisher, Robert.
1990.Teaching children to think, Basil Blackwell
Gardener,
R.C. 1985. Social psychology and languagelearning. Edward Arnold
Some
practicalideas for sustaining motivation
1
Experiment,take risks. Vary the kinds of thingsyou do in the
classroom. See what different students respond to best. Forexample, try short
stories, films, classroom drama, songs, projects, grammarexercises,
dictations,…
2
Choose‘larger’ tasks. Chose tasks thatgive students more
‘psychological space’ to plan their own work, set their ownpace, make their own
decisions about how and what they do. For example, processwriting and
simulations.
3
Chooseopen-ended tasks. Tasks thatdifferent people can respond to
in different ways, where the absence of a‘single right answer’ means that
everybody’s work can be valued. For example, making posters, writing
poems,creating designs and describing them.
4
Providechoice. If people are involved indeciding what to do, they are
usually more committed to it. Instead of saying ‘do this’, say ‘you canchoose
exercise 3, 5 or 9. Or if you’d like to do something else, ask me.’
5
Involvestudents in classroom decision-making. Many of the
decisions that teachers make can often be shared with thestudents, without any
risks to the course as whole. You might be able to share decisions aboutwhen
homework is set, how long they will spend on a particular task, what theywill
do next lesson, and so on.
6 Find
out whatstudents think. Find out if studentsthink they need more
practice, if they have suggestions of their own, if theyfind things easy or
difficult, boring or interesting. You could place a ‘suggestion box’ in
yourclass, or write an open-ended letter that students could complete with
theirideas, or devise short questionnaires.
7 Think
abouthow you give feedback and what you give feedback on. If you
can identify students who arebeginning to sink, try to identify aspects that
you can praise andencourage. Instead of just giving a lowmark, explain to the
students, in concrete terms, what they could do to improveit next time.
8
Communicate asense of optimism in learning.Communicate a
belief thateveryonecanlearn. Encourage students to try, totake risks
without fear of losing marks or feeling stupid. Show them how muchtheyhavelearned.
Offer help as they ask for it.
Andrew Littlejohn teaches for theInstitute of
Education, University of London, and is the author of a number ofcoursebooks
including Cambridge English for Schools (CUP), a course forsecondary-aged
students which integrates English with wider educational aims. Other
articles and a complete on-line A-Z of ELT methodology:are available atwww.AndrewLittlejohn.net
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