Editorial
This article originally appeared in ‘The Teacher’ magazine.
Part One Language Domesticated (1): Does Foreign Language Learning Have to Hurt? appeared in HLT, Dec 2011, and Part Two Language Domesticated (2): Does Testing Cause Learning…? in HLT, Feb 2012
Language Domesticated (3): Motivation Made Local
Grzegorz Śpiewak, Poland
Grzegorz Śpiewak is a teacher, teacher trainer, EFL project manager, adviser and author. He is also a former lecturer and deputy director for PE at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw, currently affiliated with New School, New York, where he teaches EFL methodology at an on-line MATESOL programme. A former IATEFL Poland president, he is now head ELT Consultant for Macmillan Polska, President of DOS-Teacher Training Solutions and co-founder of deDOMO Education, lead author of Angielski dla rodziców deDOMO.
E-mail: grzegorz@e-dos.org
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Background
Local…
Climbing down from a high horse
Rewarded by rewards
You say - you get!
Welcome back to a new article series brought to you by deDOMO Education. The overall purpose of the series is to introduce an alternative approach to foreign language education, tried and tested with considerable success recently.
We started out in episode 1 by exploring some parallels between foreign language learning and traumatic initiation rituals, followed by – in episode 2 - exploring the crucial difference between assessment OF and assessment FOR learning. This month we turn to the ‘how’ of the whole approach and suggest an alternative, “domestically inspired” take on motivation to learn a foreign language. Read on to find out the details!
In a highly influential and widely quoted manifesto of what has come to be dubbed ‘post-method approach’, Kumaravadivelu (2006) argued that all effective EFL methodology is local. ‘Local’ i.e. less reliant on all-out, ‘global’ generalizations about learners and learning, but rather increasingly more and more sensitive to the local learning conditions, local academic cultures, and the make-up of any single group of learners. Given the title of our article series, we wish to pursue the possibility of localizing another crucial ingredient of success when learning a foreign language: the very motivation to make the effort.
The motivational ‘high horse’, as I see it, is an otherwise respectable appeal to long-term foreign language learning benefits. Examples include: ‘Study hard now so that you’ll be able to make friends when we go on holiday abroad next year’, When I was your age, I didn’t have any of the opportunities to learn that you have these days. And I only realized how important English was when I was offered my first job with Procter & Gamble’, or any number of such pronouncements, meant to stimulate the child’s or teenager’s interest and zest for learning a foreign language. The problem with them is that they are so long-term and thus so detached from the kid’s current sphere of interest that they bring little of any effect whatsoever. One might as well encourage a 7-year-old to put 10% of his or her weekly pocket money into a … personal pension scheme. Given how many years of saving up lies ahead of them when they are 7, this would certainly make economic sense – and yet I bet you laughed three lines ago, as it does sound very odd indeed.
The point I am trying to make that the above sample rationales for learning English or any other foreign language, reasonable as they no doubt are from the adult vantage point – will do little to entice an average underage learner. To put it bluntly, they are too global and so need to be made much more local to mean anything at all.
It is all easier said than done, I can hear the reader retorting. Well, yes and no. It is difficult if you remain high up on your horse of global long-term motivation and insist on your learners’ altruistic commitment to study. Of course in the ideal world learner motivation should come from within, rather than being stimulated by a combination of stick and carrot. Some go as far as arguing that such ‘intrinsic motivation’ is the only true educational drive worth supporting, while all external motivators are detrimental in the end. One recent example of this line of thinking is Alfie Kohn’s volume, very tellingly entitled ‘Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise and Other Bribes’. Without attempting to undermine the overall validity of Kohn’s powerful argument, I would nevertheless dare suggest that, at least when it comes to the initial stages of foreign language learning, such intrinsic motivation itself needs to be learnt! And, somewhat paradoxically speaking, where is the motivation to develop such intrinsic motivation in oneself to come from …?! The careful reader will no doubt have inferred by now where I am heading: it is my prime duty as a foreign language educator to help the learner pass the initial hurdles, and yes, I am ready with all the “bribes” that I can get hold of: gold stars, straight A’s, stickers, lollipops and mountains of chocolate. Let alone endless verbal praise. In my 20 years’ experience I have as yet not seen a learner whose language progress got hindered by too much praise, and many, many of those who – in my opinion at least – never stood a chance, as no one bothered to climb change over from the high horse to a little pony…
This point was argued at length in the opening episode of the ‘Language Domesticated’ series (the January 2011 issue of The Teacher), where Marek Jannasz and I compared the experience of starting a new foreign language to a painful initiation ritual, like a driver license course. Anyone who has gone through the trauma of a driving exam and the terror of early days behind the wheel will confirm that the pleasure of driving is not something you get to experience quickly. And if it’s true of learning to drive, how much more true it is of learning to speak a foreign language! The intrinsic motivation to study further, driven by the pleasure experienced when reading a book in the English original or when communicating successfully with a stranger on the London Underground, is only reserved for those who found some other force earlier to get to the advanced-enough, threshold stage. And it is the interests and needs of all those at initial stages that I have firmly in mind here, lest they forever remain false beginners…
Time to get down to business and offer some pointers for how motivation can indeed be “localized” in the sense outlined above. As the heading of this section suggests, I am going to maintain – somewhat contra Kohn and other “high horse” motivators – that the average foreign language learner not only needs a carrot, but a whole lot of it!
The “carrot” can be manifested in the way we assess learners’ progress and report it back to them – the fundamental role of which we discussed in Episode 2 of the ‘Language Domesticated’ series, amplifying the need for a much greater role of “assessment FOR learning ” as opposed to the traditional “assessment OF” learning. The former is supportive and future-output oriented, the latter is administrative and essentially past-obsessed. The former sees learner errors as evidence of the process of learning (and as such something to be welcome by the language specialist as vital localizing feedback, an indispensable source of information on where to intervene pedagogically) while the latter as signals of learner failure (and as such something to fight against and eradicate as quickly as possible).
But the deDOMO approach goes one step further and encourages an even more radical, immediate localization. In other words, we suggest that rewards of all kinds – tangible as well as intangible - are good for you, particularly at early levels of language learning. And, given that we are leaving the vantage point of a high horse and assuming the perspective of a little pony, the rewards need not necessarily be huge, but they crucially need themselves to be localized, which in practical terms means that they must be [a] truly desirable for the one to be rewarded with them, and [b] available fast, not in, say, a year or two, but preferably right away, and if not, in a few days’ time at the very worst.
The wording of the heading above sums up rather aptly, I feel, the way we have localized the motivation to speak English in the deDOMO approach. The localization is the result of a simple observation about what it is that makes a child (particularly in early years of life) to use the first language with mum and dad. The main reason is transactional – to express and satisfy his or her immediate needs: asking for a glass of apple juice, watching cartoons on television, searching for a teddy bear, complaining about an older brother, wanting to play a bit longer in the sandpit, persuading mummy to buy another packet of crisps, and so on and so forth. In the case of L1, the motivation to speak stems from the (typically immediate) satisfaction of these needs by a care provider. Can we not make use of this in the case of L2 learning?
The deDOMO answer is: of course we can! With our own children in the context of our own home it is quite straightforward in fact: all we need to do as parents-teachers is introduce a home rule whereby the child can increase their chances to get what s/he wants if the wish is formulated in L2 rather than in L1. Why will this work? Because – and I am speaking from my own parental experience – it so happens that on a great many domestic occasions mum and dad are unwilling to satisfy those needs, or at least not to the desired extent. Think of requests for extra TV or computer time, for an extra helping of favourite dessert, or for a later-than usual curfew. A typical domestic teaching scenario will thus look more or less like this:
Child: ¿Puedo jugar en la computadora?
Parent: ¿Cómo se puede decir que en Inglés?
Child: No se.
Parent: Can I play on the computer?
Child: ¿Cómo?
Parent: [slower] Can I play – on the computer? ¿Puede repetir?
Child: Can I play... ¿Y después?
Parent: ... on the computer.
Child: Can I play on the computer?
Parent: Yes, you can. You’ve got 30 minutes.
adapted from: Angielski dla rodziców deDOMO.
Przewodnik metodyczny, Warszawa 2010
Needless to say, the Spanish in the example above is instantly substitutable for any other L1. The above is a prototypical domestic teaching-learning “occasion” – mind you, not a lesson, with its long-term, “high-horse” objectives but an incident that can happen almost fully spontaneously and yields immediate pay-off to both parties involved. The child is rewarded by “softening” Mum or Dad to grant the highly desired (and therefore locally very motivating!) extra game-playing time on a PSP or PC. And Mum and Dad are also rewarded, hearing their offspring make a genuine attempt at truly communicating in a foreign language. Needless to add, such an incident will have no impact unless it gets recycled. But here is where localization comes to the rescue yet again: Mum and Dad will naturally choose as their teaching material the current needs of their own child. And who knows better than Mum and Dad what they are – after all they keep coming up over and over again, several times a day, usually. Which in turn means that, if selected properly, the linguistic exponents of these needs will get naturally recycled, not because Mum and Dad have made a firm resolution to this effect, but because the child will instigate them, having understood very quickly that making a bit of effort in L2 is not about a summer holiday two years ahead, but about getting a precious 30 minutes extra on their beloved car chase game tonight!
Is it a case of bribery, as Kohn would be likely to say? How can anyone suggest we should “pay the child for speaking English” (as one offended parent protested). My answer, both as EFL methodologist and – more importantly perhaps – as a practicing parent, is that I am perfectly happy to live with this sort of deal as long as I see its immediate benefits. And, to be perfectly honest, isn’t it the case that as parents we often “pay our kids for nothing”, i.e. succumb to their nagging at a cash-out desk or in our living room. I would in fact go as far as suggesting that the immediate-pay off incentive should be amplified even further, and take the form of a more structured bonus system, with the learner collecting bonus points and exchanging them for some sort of extra reward agreed on in advance. All in the interest of showing the child immediate, local reasons and thus motivating him or her to try again, and try harder. For further details of how this can be organized, please refer to my ‘Angielski dla rodziców deDOMO. Przewodnik metodyczny’, where at one point I argue that, if well administered – the game can become a sort of domestic financial education project.
Without going into any further details here, let me only – in way of conclusion – encourage all professionals reading this short episode to try and think of ways of adapting the above localization solution to the formal schooling context.
In subsequent episodes, we shall build on this central idea and demonstrate that, apart from the methodological and psychological aspects, localization and domestication can apply in equal measure to foreign language taught and (hopefully) learnt at home and beyond.
References
Kohn, A. (1999), Punished by Rewards, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston – New York
Kumaravadivelu, B. (2006) Understanding Language Teaching: From Method to Postmethod, Mahwah, New Jersey, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates
Please check the Methodology and Language for Kindergarten Teachers course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Methodology and Language for Primary Teachers course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Methodology and Language for Secondary Teachers course at Pilgrims website.
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