by Christopher Walker
Introduction
The sight of a glum-looking student entering the building is usually the prompt for one teacher to declare to another: “They’re only here because their parents make them come.”
This reaction might say much about the teacher’s state of mind, but it also reveals something else: motivation is seen as a simple phenomenon and can easily be recognised by teachers as either present or absent. By suggesting that the motivation of a student is entirely down to external factors – in this case, the parental assertion that their child must attend additional English classes – there is a great danger that the nuances of motivation will be ignored, and that the teacher will be turning their back on many opportunities for making the classroom a more effective learning environment.
This article continues on from the excellent work of Chris Richards in Issue 51 of the IH Journal. His article, “Motivation: Implications for Practice,” is a fine introduction to some of the themes I want to explore here. In this article I shall restrict my focus to young learners who are still at school and can be considered to some extent as ‘unwilling’ participants in the class; I will likewise restrict the discussion to a small selection of motivation types that I believe the teacher can control. Interesting though it is, the idea of ‘Ideal L2 Self’ introduced by Dörnyei (2005) is slightly beyond the scope of this paper, and will not be discussed.
What is Motivation?
The verb ‘to motivate’ arrived in the year 1863, with the sense of ‘to stimulate toward action’ (Online Etymological Dictionary – www.etymonline.com); the verb itself was derived from the Old French word motif, which carried both the senses of ‘moving’ and ‘impelling’ – and this combination, suggesting both our own need to move and the sense of being impelled by something external to ourselves, is crucial to our understanding of motivation in the EFL classroom.
Dörnyei and Ryan (2015) underline the importance of motivation: “It provides the primary impetus to initiate L2 learning and later the driving force to sustain the long, often tedious learning process; indeed, all the other factors involved in SLA presuppose motivation to some extent” (Dörnyei and Ryan, 2015, p72). This idea of an ‘impetus’ provides a workable definition of motivation, one that is underlined by Ortega (2014): “Motivation is usually understood to refer to the desire to initiate L2 learning and the effort employed to sustain it” (Ortega, 2014, p168).
A Single Form of Motivation?
The danger for the EFL teacher is to say that a particular student is ‘motivated’ or ‘lacks motivation’, and to leave it at that: the risk being that this lack of nuance in the teacher’s understanding of motivation can lead to the wrong approaches being taken, or the assumption being made that it is not possible for the teacher to do anything about the student’s level of motivation. Dörnyei (2010) warns against any oversimplification of the concept of motivation: “[N]o existing motivation theory to date has managed – or even attempted – to offer a comprehensive and integrative account of all the main types of possible motives” (Dörnyei, 2010, p4). For teachers to see motivation as a one-size-fits-all phenomenon is clearly misguided.
Extrinsic and Intrinsic Motivation
Traditionally, motivation has been divided into two main areas: intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. Skinner (1953) was among the first to look at extrinsic motivation in his experiments on behaviourism in animals; the focus was on stimulus response, and in a sense we can still see that as being the case in EFL: when a teacher offers a reward for the student’s successful completion of a task, we are looking at extrinsic motivation.
Later, academics began to look at the possibility of motivation coming from within the self; Berlyne (1960) is a good example of a researcher who took an interest in internal forms of motivation. From around the 1970s onwards forms of motivation were seen to belong to one of the two kinds; Gardner and Lambert (1972) recast the dichotomy as ‘instrumental’ versus ‘integrative’. According to Dörnyei and Ryan (2015), the social psychological period introduced by Gardner was supplanted by the cognitive-situated period of the 1990s, “mainly driven by cognitive theories originally developed in non-L2-specific research” (Dörnyei and Ryan, 2015, pp73-4), and towards what we presently have, which could be termed the process-oriented period: “characterized by an interest in motivational change, especially concerned with how motivation emerges from interaction between individuals and contexts” (p74).
Although his work predates Dörnyei and Ryan’s (2015) ‘process-oriented period’, I would like to restrict the scope of my study to Skehan (1991), who suggested a general model for the various influences on motivation:
Of greatest relevance in the present discussion are the sources that are listed as outside the student. “Materials/teaching embraces those influences on the motivation of students that are the consequences of the instructional context. […] Constraints and rewards concern those consequences of learning that are manipulated by others (eg educational agencies, employers, parents). Frequent class tests, public examinations, monetary reward, and threats of being cut from the class all fall into this category” (Skehan 1991, p281). However, that is not to say that those relating to expectations and successes cannot be in some way affected by the actions of the teacher.
Motivation Outside the Individual
Skehan (1991), as mentioned above, addresses several different aspects of extrinsic motivation that can be acted upon by the teacher.
The first of these is the choice of materials – though here I would like to extend Skehan’s (1991) notion and include as well the teacher’s own attitude towards the materials. Students are sensitive to their teacher’s mood, and I have observed for myself that when the teacher adopts a negative attitude towards the course book, the students themselves tend to come into alignment and dislike the book as well. This can have compound consequences: for instance, if the teacher derides the course book, not only will the students be less inclined to work from it, they will probably be less inclined to do the homework that they are set from the accompanying workbook.
The teachers at my school do not have a lot of choice about which materials they use; they may of course supplement the course book with other materials, but it is expected that at least 80% of the course book will be completed by the end of the year. The midyear and end-of-year tests are both based on material in the course book and besides, the student’s parents expect that the majority of the course book – which they paid for – will be completed by the end of the year. Whether the teacher likes the book or not, they should at least be politic here - for the good of their students’ motivation.
Secondly, we can consider the variety of activities that the students perform in the class. Intuitively we can see that the greater the number of activities, the greater the interest taken by the students: though this is only true when the activities themselves are interesting. Unfortunately, an activity that is interesting for one student is not necessarily interesting for another; more outgoing students might enjoy role-plays, while introverted students might prefer reading tasks. The key is to ensure that a large number of different activities is included in the lesson so that the students’ different interests can be accommodated. The effect of doing too many of the same activity, or of doing too many activities that a student does not enjoy, is likely a decrease in motivation.
Third, we can look at the relationship between the student and the teacher. A student who works to please their teacher is extrinsically motivated – they are not performing the tasks they have been given for any internally-motivated reason, but rather because they like their teacher or wish to be viewed by the teacher in a positive light. While it is not possible for all teachers to be liked by all students, it is certainly possible for teachers to establish good rapport with their classes, and to show that they are keenly interested in their students’ success. As Dörnyei (2010) says, “[I]f the teacher shows commitment towards the students’ learning, there is a very good chance that they will do the same thing” (Dörnyei 2010, p110).
And finally, within the scope of this paper, I would like to consider the relationship between the student and their parent(s). As with all generalisations, the teacher’s utterance at the start of this paper is occasionally true. Some students only attend their classes because their parents force them to, often, in my experience, with only a ‘stick’ as motivation, and no ‘carrot’. In such cases I think it is important that the teacher address the issue head-on: they should arrange a meeting with the parent to discuss their child’s motivation, and to find a way to keep motivation high at home as well as at school. The good work of some teachers – varied, interesting lessons using materials that the students respond positively to – is sometimes undone by a parent who grills their child on everything that occurred in the lesson as soon as they get home. It is highly likely that the ‘glum-looking student’ is precisely that as the result of a verbal exchange with their parent directly before the lesson; if this is the case, it would further reinforce the advice to teachers that they should start their class on a high, so to speak, with a fun activity that might help to distract their students from the outside world.
Motivation Inside the Individual
Skehan (1991) suggests that intrinsic motivation is more powerful than extrinsic. A student that possesses this ‘integrative’ form of motivation – they might see themselves as moving closer to the culture of the target language – “is thought to have an internal, more enduring motivation for language study and is therefore more likely to make the cumulative effort that is necessary to achieve language-learning success” (Ramage, 1990, in Skehan, 1991, p282). Taking a step back, we can look at Ortega (2014) for a practical definition of this form of motivation: “When individuals engage in behaviour that they understand as self-initiated by choice and largely sustained by inherent enjoyment in the activity […], they are said to be intrinsically motivated” (Ortega 2014, p176).
At first glance it might seem that the EFL teacher has little control over a student’s intrinsic motivation, but I do not think that this is the case; if we can offer our students a combination of the choice and enjoyment mentioned by Ortega (2014) we can hope to increase intrinsic motivation.
For example, one form of intrinsic motivation comes from the success students might enjoy in the classroom. Success itself takes many forms – from the small-scale, appropriate responses to the teacher’s questioning, to the large-scale, formalised testing that is part of many a language course.
Therefore, teachers can strive to make success possible in the classroom. Success must be earned, of course; a student who is praised for underlining the title in their notebook will not be fooled. But by moderating the difficulty of some tasks so that weaker students in the class can still achieve success, or by correctly applying scaffolding to their instructions to keep the task achievable, the teacher makes it more possible that a student will enjoy the fruits of their labour in the classroom. Brophy (1998) is clear on this point: “The simplest way to ensure that students expect success is to make sure that they achieve it consistently” (Brophy 1998 in Dörnyei 2010, p115). If the teacher can also help their students to become more autonomous by this route, the positive effects can be multiplied. As Little (2002) says, “[I]f learners are proactively committed to their learning, the problem of motivation is by definition solved” (Little 2002).
Another form of intrinsic motivation is the idea that students begin to associate themselves with the target culture of the language they are studying. This is related to the idea of ‘international posture’ proposed by Yashima (Yashima et al 2004, in Ortega 2014). In the absence of native speakers in the community, this ‘posture’ can help students to feel more integrated into the target culture. We must remember how wide and varied this target culture is. Students who report that they are learning English because, for instance, they love the films of Wes Anderson, appear to have a higher level of motivation than those who know little about the culture; it follows, therefore, that students who are exposed to more of the positive aspects of the target culture will find something to like there, and subsequently be motivated both to learn more (about the singer, the football team, et cetera) and to become more engaged with the target language.
Extrinsic versus Intrinsic – Positive and Negative Reinforcement
Lepper and Henderlong (2000) point to “the experimental literature that seems to demonstrate the inherent opposition of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation” (Lepper, M.R. and Henderlong, J., 2000, p259). They give the examples of several experiments carried out in the 1970s that suggested that when participants were first given a reward for an activity and then the reward was removed, the effect on the participants’ intrinsic motivation was negative.
I have seen something similar myself. At my school, we use a rewards system that takes the form of the school’s own currency. Students are rewarded for doing their homework, speaking English in class instead of Polish, listening to the teacher, and working hard in the lessons, with paper tokens that they can collect and eventually exchange for prizes. I have always had misgivings about this scheme: when students find that the items they can buy are undesirable – not everybody can get excited about a new pencil case, for instance – they lose interest in the currency, and no longer care whether they receive it or not. If they had behaved well in the past, their teacher sometimes reported a dip in their behaviour; with the removal of the extrinsic motivation, their intrinsic motivation was likewise negatively affected. As Lepper and Henderlong (2000) put it, “[T]he receipt of rewards that lead people to view their actions as having been extrinsically motivated […] may undermine subsequent intrinsic motivation” (p265). This is certainly the case in my teaching context, as it is the teacher who generally decides on the recipients of the currency.
However, I agree with Lepper and Henderlong (2000 p265) that it is possible for extrinsic success to lead to increases in intrinsic motivation. A few years ago I met a student who attended class for one reason only: to pass the Cambridge English C1: Advanced exam, and thus be allowed to skip his school’s B1 level lessons mandated by the board of education. Over the course of his year of studies, however, he developed such an interest in etymology – I recommend the use of etymology as a way of improving vocabulary skills ahead of high-level exams – that an intrinsic desire to study the language for its own sake was born, and he remained a student of the school for many years after gaining the certificate he had wanted. I do not believe that such cases exist in isolation; rather, I feel that one aspect of the teacher’s job is to identify students with high extrinsic and low intrinsic motivation, and put the former to use in growing the latter.
The Time-Sensitive Nature of Motivation
As far back as Berlyne (1960) we can see the transient nature of some forms of motivation: “Motivational states are generally at work for a matter of minutes or hours” (Berlyne, 1960, p2). Dörnyei (2010) updates Berlyne (1960) and draws a connection to SLA: “[W]hen we talk about sustained long-term activities such as learning a foreign language, motivation does not remain constant during the course of months, years or even during a single lesson” (Dörnyei 2010, p6). It is important for teachers to be aware of this. Just as a teacher who has delivered a magnificent presentation on the present perfect might mistakenly believe that the students have all ‘got it’, any teacher who thinks that the topic of motivation can be addressed once and for all is similarly mistaken.
Student motivation is a movable thing, more like the river itself than a bucket of water taken from it. When the teacher feels it is safe to ignore the issue of motivation, they will soon find that students who had appeared highly motivated start to lose their way. It is vital that teachers are vigilant, and remember the principles of motivation in every lesson.
Conclusion
Motivation is a multifaceted issue, far too large to be comprehensively described in one article. However, there are steps that every teacher can take in every lesson to increase their students’ extrinsic motivation, and, with the right approach, they can work to improve their students’ intrinsic motivation as well.
What is that ‘right’ approach? This is where the situation becomes less clear: “[F]ar more research has been done in the past to identify various motives and validate motivational theories than to develop techniques to increase motivation” (Dörnyei 2010, p105). Though studies exist, it does feel as though teachers must rely on their own experiences to see what works and what doesn’t: and to further complicate matters, it does appear that motivating strategies are so context-dependent that finding something that works in one classroom does not guarantee it will work in another.
We can be sure however that developing the extrinsic side of our students’ motivation will have a positive effect on the lessons themselves: students will appear happier, be more productive, and engage more with the material. But in the long-term it is far more important that teachers help their students to develop their intrinsic motivation; when the term has ended and the student bids farewell to their teacher, it is vital that the student still carries within them a desire to learn; otherwise, all of their hard work will have been for nought.
References
Skinner, B.F. (1953) Science and Human Behavior. New York: Macmillan
Author Biography
Christopher Walker is the Editor of the IH Journal, and also Director of Studies at International House Bielsko-Biała. He completed his MA Applied Linguistics and TESOL a few years ago and since then has developed a love for all things academic. He spends his spare time demonstrating nominative determinism - in other words, walking.