Skip to main content

Motivation

This was a draft extract from the MFL Handbook Gianfranco Conti and I wrote. Motivation is a huge topic, but see what you make of this:

See also: https://gianfrancoconti.wordpress.com/2015/05/30/self-efficacy-the-most-neglected-motivational-factor-in-the-foreign-language-classroom/

Zoltán Dörnyei and Kata Csizér (1998)* produced, from their studies, these ‘ten commandments for motivating language learners’. They are of a general nature, but make good sense.

1.            Set a personal example with your own behaviour.
2.            Create a pleasant, relaxed atmosphere in the classroom.
3.            Present the tasks properly.
4.            Develop a good relationship with the learners.
5.            Increase the learners’ linguistic self-confidence.
6.            Make the language classes interesting.
7.            Promote learner autonomy.
8.            Personalise the learning process.
9.            Increase the learners’ ‘goal-orientedness’.
10.          Familiarize learners with the target language culture.

Let’s dig down a bit and examine these ten prescriptions.

1. This might suggest, for example, that you will be organised, punctual, fair, consistent, caring, demanding and understanding of students’ needs.

2. Although this may not be achieved instantly, it would be an excellent goal. We know that students are more likely to learn when they are not anxious, when they can take risks without fear and when the classroom atmosphere is supportive. Some of the very best lessons we have observed over the years have not only been methodologically competent, but have taken place in a warm, extremely supportive environment.

3. ‘Presenting tasks properly’ is open to a wide variety of interpretations! At the very least, however, we might suggest a logical order of presentation and practice, clarity, recycling, and a range of presentational approaches. This constitutes much of the content of this book.

4. Many teachers would say this is the number one factor. How you do this cannot be easily prescribed, but is clearly tied up with all the other factors in the list. It is also a question of your own personality, self-belief, and confidence in your pedagogical approach, as well as cognitive and affective awareness of students’ needs at every moment. (We look at this in our chapter on behaviour management.) It can take time to evolve. It can also depend on your reputation preceding you, so that when students arrive in your classroom they are predisposed to behaving with you in a certain way. New and trainee teachers are at a disadvantage in this regard, since a reputation has to be established.

5.  Sound pedagogical practice including clear presentation, the opportunity to do scaffolded, structured and repeated practice, a clear, graded progression in the scheme of work or curriculum plan, and effective formative assessment techniques and feedback should all contribute to increasing the students’ linguistic self-confidence.

6. Stimulating language input and classroom activities are a must. By one hypothesis, all you need to do for students to progress is to provide ‘compelling’, meaningful input and acquisition will naturally occur. We would not say it is as simple as that, but quite clearly, the more interesting you can make your listening and reading resources and tasks, the better. This will mean not doing every task in the text book, performing a mental triage of possible activities to eliminate the ones which are likely to make classes switch off. 

This is not to say that every lesson need be ‘fun’. Far from it, but enjoyment and motivation can come from activities which are inherently interesting rather than fun. But, let’s say you wanted to practise verb conjugations: this might be better achieved by chanting memorable songs with beginners, doing quick mini whiteboard tasks, or playing a game of ‘battleships’ using a grid based on two axes of subject pronouns and infinitives, rather than just doing a traditional grammar worksheet.

7. It is all too easy to ‘spoon feed’ classes with the material they need for the next assessment, leaving them totally dependent on your input. We know that our most successful students are able to work on their own if they are given the opportunity. This requires controlled practice and careful scaffolding in the early stages, but will lead to greater skill and the capacity to work independently as time progresses. Setting pair work tasks, appropriately interesting homework, open-ended tasks which allow the fastest students to do more - all of these contribute to developing the autonomous learner.

8. ‘Personalising the learning process’ could mean a number of things. For us, it would involve effective, subtle differentiation during oral interactions in the classroom, individual feedback both orally and on paper, individual goal setting (either informally or through a school’s established tracking systems) as well as allowing an element of choice of task. Grouping by ability is also relevant in this context, as well as intervening where necessary where students are not meeting their expected goals.

9. Because language learning is a slow, accumulative process, it is useful to provide short term goals and reasons for doing tasks. Task-based activities can play a role, along with transactional tasks, activities involving native speakers and L2 country classes and, let's be frank, the assessment regime. Most students are motivated to work harder by the prospect  of an upcoming test. There is some evidence to suggest, as we discuss in our chapter on differentiation, that boys in particular respond well to goal-oriented tasks.

10. It is likely that students will be more motivated to acquire the second language if they understand its culture better and, ideally, have opportunities to interact with it. In addition, many younger students are inherently excited by learning about different cultures. We consider this in more detail in our chapter about culture.

Dörnyei, Z. and Csizér, K. (1998) Language Teaching Research 2,3,  p. 203–229

Comments

  1. Hi Steve. Just thought I'd chip in that I think it would be useful to have the 10 "titles" at the head of each paragraph, so readers don't have to refer back to the list.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Also maybe you need to differentiate between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation which 7-10 are moving towards.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Yes, we deal with that later, along with other models of motivation and their implications for the MFL classroom.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What is the natural order hypothesis?

The natural order hypothesis states that all learners acquire the grammatical structures of a language in roughly the same order. This applies to both first and second language acquisition. This order is not dependent on the ease with which a particular language feature can be taught; in English, some features, such as third-person "-s" ("he runs") are easy to teach in a classroom setting, but are not typically fully acquired until the later stages of language acquisition. The hypothesis was based on morpheme studies by Heidi Dulay and Marina Burt, which found that certain morphemes were predictably learned before others during the course of second language acquisition. The hypothesis was picked up by Stephen Krashen who incorporated it in his very well known input model of second language learning. Furthermore, according to the natural order hypothesis, the order of acquisition remains the same regardless of the teacher's explicit instruction; in other words,

What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought.  ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a language).

La retraite à 60 ans

Suite à mon post récent sur les acquis sociaux..... L'âge légal de la retraite est une chose. Je voudrais bien savoir à quel âge les gens prennent leur retraite en pratique - l'âge réel de la retraite, si vous voulez. J'ai entendu prétendre qu'il y a peu de différence à cet égard entre la France et le Royaume-Uni. Manifestation à Marseille en 2008 pour le maintien de la retraite à 60 ans © AFP/Michel Gangne Six Français sur dix sont d’accord avec le PS qui défend la retraite à 60 ans (BVA) Cécile Quéguiner Plus de la moitié des Français jugent que le gouvernement a " tort de vouloir aller vite dans la réforme " et estiment que le PS a " raison de défendre l’âge légal de départ en retraite à 60 ans ". Résultat d’un sondage BVA/Absoluce pour Les Échos et France Info , paru ce matin. Une majorité de Français (58%) estiment que la position du Parti socialiste , qui défend le maintien de l’âge légal de départ à la retraite à 60 ans,