by Banafsheh Saleminezhad
It all started when I decided to reevaluate my teaching skills and asked my students to give me some constructive feedback.
Predictably, I received some general feedback, the kind that is nice to hear but that helps nobody.
But one student complained that I was never insistent enough. “I don’t have enough motivation to do my homework,” he said. A painful thing to hear, if at least rather honest, though it was strange that he was complaining about my role in the matter!
I resolved to work on his motivation ( it’s good to have articles like Chris Richards’ to help!), but over the weeks that followed nothing really seemed to stick, and his lack of motivation to do his assignments became an ongoing concern.
My main goal was, and remains, to internalize the motivation for him to take some time to have some retrieval practice in order to activate the pieces of language we had gone through together. Giving him a mark or a reward for doing his homework might have helped him to do it more regularly, but remove the reward and the motivation disappears - and when our lessons came to an end, he would have gone back to his old habits.
As my initial attempts didn’t seem to have any impact, I decided to design lesson plans in which the focus was mainly on production. However, what I failed to consider was the simple fact that there is always a reason behind any lack of interest. Every lesson, I attempted - with some success - to introduce new terms into his lexicon and reinforce their use whenever the opportunity presented itself. My main concern was the absence of enthusiastic participation I had hoped for, and I even noticed emerging signs of apathy in his responses.
Let me tell you a little more about the student. He is Turkish and in his thirties, working as a software engineer in a global company that naturally requires communication in English. He was at an intermediate level and had a work-oriented need for spoken and written communication in English. With his level of knowledge and proficiency, one might wonder what the problem was. I know I wondered, and I reflected on it for quite a long time.
Our conversations kept circling around the same issue - grammar, and how my student felt about it. A student fixated on issues of grammar - does that ring a bell for anyone reading? But I was teaching under the assumption that my student already knew all the grammar he needed - he could tell me the rules readily enough, but the problems emerged when he tried to put them into practice.
In the hope of adding a new level of complexity, as I was doing in my lessons with the student, we often tend to neglect the process of internalization. VanPatten stresses the importance of the cognitive processing of input:
“Since the internalization of intake is not a mere accumulation of discrete bits of data, data have to ‘fit in’ in some way, and sometimes this accommodation of a particular set of data causes changes in the rest of the system. In some cases, it may not fit in at all and is not accommodated by the system. They simply do not make it into the long-term store” (VanPatten, 1993, p. 439).
Given that I had failed in both making him feel more confident about his production skills and moving beyond his plateau (frankly, I was beginning to see the plateau as being more and more like a ceiling), I started to reflect on my teaching ‘method’, and came up with these three questions:
- What is the input that is refusing to ‘fit in’?
- How can I help my student to become aware of that input?
- What material will help?
I thought to myself, maybe I needed to once again take a step back and rethink, this time, my own perspective towards learning, not as a teacher, but as a learner - something I could relate to, as I was learning Turkish myself at the time.
The next step I took was involving my student in the investigation process. What we needed to look into was his current knowledge and any inconsistencies between that knowledge and his ability to produce language. It was essential for us to identify inefficiencies and mental obstacles.
We returned to the idea that my student mainly had difficulties ‘putting’ the right tense into the right ‘place.’ I prepared an informal text with all the tenses underlined, and we analysed the contextual use of each tense, rather than worrying ourselves with reference to the grammatical rules. The questions that we discussed were:
- What is the tense of the verb?
- Why has it been used here?
- What other tense(s) could you use in this particular context if you wanted to form this meaning? Why?
His first reaction to this lesson plan was everything a teacher could ask for: enthusiastic, encouraged, and eager to proceed. This made me think that ‘unmotivated’ is too ambiguous. As we proceeded, we discovered the areas where my student was confident in the use of tenses, and areas where he was still uncertain. There were also places in between, where he might say, “I know it, but I don’t feel it.”
One area of difficulty came with his understanding of the modal verb ‘would’, the past form of ‘will.’ Of course, it was essential for him to have come to the realization of this lack of understanding by himself during our tense-exploratory text, which he did and which he then expressed to me. In order to make the ‘input’ into ‘intake,’ the learner must consciously ‘notice’ it so it can be processed for learning (Schmidt, 1994). According to Schmidt (1990, p.132), “[T]he subjective experience of noticing is the necessary and sufficient condition for the conversion of input to intake.”
My job now was to wait for him to discover and to ‘notice’ the information gap in his interlanguage.
When he expressed his doubts about the correct uses of ‘would’ in English, I provided him with a lesson in which we investigated different aspects of the target language together. In a subsequent lesson, he said:
“…by the way, after the last lesson I feel more confident about using ‘would’ (Me: Really?!) …yes, because I know it now…I knew it, but I couldn’t feel it…now I can feel it.”
As we talked, I noticed new forms in his language production, and also he was more responsive and expressive due to the fact that he had more resources to access in order to communicate his thoughts. The first trial was remarkably successful, and he requested more practice following this approach. The feedback was encouraging:
“I used to think that my knowledge was better than my speaking. Now I am thinking maybe the opposite… knowing that my knowledge is at the same level as my speaking makes me feel more confident because now I know it’s not about my speaking skill, it’s about my knowledge.”
This piece of feedback was of great value to me since I saw it as the first missing piece in the puzzle. I realized that the mental obstacle for him was feeling insecure about his speaking as something faulty and maybe unfixable. This is the case for many learners.
I felt he was ready to tackle a more advanced text, though in the same way - by looking at the choices the author had made with each verb form. During this second trial, the pace was faster - but he responded well all the same. To give an example, he had successfully grasped the concept of Present Perfect and the distinctions between Present Perfect Continuous and Past Simple, which is also problematic among Turkish English language learners. As he said: “I think the main thing is the difference between Present Perfect and Past Simple… the rest is easy.”
Towards the end of the course, I targeted my overarching aim, which was to develop in my student the autonomy he needed to carry on his journey out of the classroom.
Though this can be a difficult task, we found that most of the hard work was behind us. My student loved this approach to understanding grammar, and he had demonstrated - to himself, as much as to me - that he could use it with more complex texts as well as with simpler pieces. All we needed was to find the right text for him to study from, and this is where my love for the Harry Potter books came into play. During our very first lesson, I introduced the series to him, and surprisingly enough, he purchased the complete series and started reading them. We would discuss the story and the characters every now and then, and I distinctly remember I spoiled the death of the great Dumbledore (unforgivable!). Just before the start of the second round, I asked him if he had found our previous text beneficial. After giving me his feedback, he said:
“I want to say one more thing… last night I was reading Harry Potter, and I applied our method to the text.”
I had been waiting for this moment for a long time! The fact that he had applied the essence of our research to his daily activities out of the classroom was a hopeful sign that I had managed to have an impact on what Allwright has suggested as the ‘quality of life’ of my student (Allwright, 2003). It was the beginning of the development of autonomy, but I could only hope that he would continue on this journey. In our very last lesson, I expressed my hope to him, and his response was:
“My plan is to finish the whole series of books… let’s see how many years it will take me!”
References & Bibliography
Allwright, D. (2003). Exploratory practice: Rethinking practitioner research in language teaching. Language Teaching Research, 7(2), 113-141.
Allwright, D. (2005). Developing principles for practitioner research: The case of exploratory practice. The Modern Language Journal, 89(3), 353-366.
Ellis, R. (2012). Language Teaching Research and Language Pedagogy. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Fromkin, V., Rodman, R., & Hymes, N. (2018). An Introduction to Language (11th ed.). Boston: Cengage Learning.
Richards, C. (2024). Motivation: Implications for Practice. IH Journal, #51
Schmidt, R. (1990). The role of consciousness in second language learning. Applied Linguistics, 11(2), 129-158.
Schmidt, R. (1994). Implicit learning and the cognitive unconscious: Of artificial and SLA. In N. Ellis (Ed.), Implicit and Explicit Learning of Languages (pp. 165-209). London: Academic Press.
VanPatten, B. (1993). Grammar Teaching for the Acquisition-Rich Classroom. Foreign Language Annals, 26(4), 435–450.
Ünlü, A. (2015). How alert should I be to learn a language? The noticing hypothesis and its implications for language teaching. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 199, 261-267.
Author Biography
Banafsheh Saleminezhad is an English as an Additional Language (EAL) teacher and language coach with nine years of experience in international school settings and diverse learning environments. She is currently pursuing a Master of Science in Education at KU Leuven in Belgium. Banafsheh holds a postgraduate degree in International Teaching from Thomas More University and a CELTA from International House Barcelona. Her research interests focus on inclusivity and diversity in education, special education, and language acquisition.