Winning Hearts and Engaging Minds through Inspirational Content
Hadi Farjami, Iran
Hadi Farjami is assistant professor at the Department of English Language and Literature, Semnan University, Iran. He has taught EFL courses to students majoring in English Language and Literature for 16 years as well as teaching ESP and EAP courses to students of science and technology. He has published articles in international and national journals and authored and co-authored EFL textbooks.
E-mail: zzmhadi@yahoo.com
Menu
Abstract
Introduction
A brief look at inspirationals
Support from practice and action researc
Theoretical support for the use of inspirational in language teaching
Back to the classroom
Semnan University project
Conclusion
References
This article presents a case for using inspirational passages in foreign language teaching. The author tries to justify such use by pointing out the motivational consequences and reporting on past practical experience. He also provides some theoretical background for such thinking and practice. Then, he presents some examples of inspirational passages to show their potentials in a variety of situations. Finally, brief mention is made of a corpus of inspirational passages set in order by English learners for level of difficulty and degree of appeal.
Key words: affect, inspirational passages, materials, motivation, spiritual intelligence
Motivation has long been a persisting major problem for most teachers of foreign languages not only in Iran but also elsewhere. In this regard, William Littlewood made the following observation around 25 years ago:
In second language learning as in every other field of human learning, motivation is the critical force which determines whether a learner embarks on a task at all, how much energy he devotes to it, and how long he perseveres. It is a complex phenomenon and includes many components: the individual’s drive, need for achievement and success, curiosity, desire for stimulation and new experience, and so on. These factors play a role in every kind of learning situation. The teacher has to activate these motivational components in the students … (Littlewood 1987: 53).
But, how can teachers enhance learners’ motivation for foreign language learning? Our practical wisdom tells us that the answers must have much to do with issues of tasks and content. Although both of these two interrelated issues have received considerable scholarly attention and still demand more, this short article is concerned with a particular aspect of the latter. It presents a case for using inspirational passages for the purpose of language learning. The main support for the argument comes from the researched-proven idea that interest plays a central role in motivation and the assumption that passages on deep inspirational topics with content of common human appeal interest a wide audience during all times and in all places.
Some established English dictionaries provide the following definitions for inspire and inspiration in the transitive usage:
To inspire: to encourage in someone the desire and ability to take action by filling with eagerness, confidence, etc.
Inspiration: arousal of the mind to special activity or creativity
To inspire: to stimulate to some creative or effective effort
Inspiration: stimulation of the human mind to creative thought or to the making of art
The survey of more dictionaries and thesauruses yielded these words as having shared meaning elements with inspiration: AWAKENING, BRAINSTORM, ILLUMINATION, SPARK, MOTIVE, VISION, INCENTIVE, DEEP THINK, ENCOURAGEMENT, STIMULATION, MOTIVATION, AROUSAL, INCITEMENT, INSIGHT, IDEA, DRIVE, AROUSAL, STIMULUS, ANIMATING SPIRIT, FIRE OF GENIUS, BRAIN WAVE. Practically, all these notions are closely related to the cognitive and/or affective states fundamental to language learning. To see how these attributes and semantic features are realized in the form of educational and learning potentials for inspirational passages, read and think of the following example from a language teacher perspective:
If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I have not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain;
Or help one injured little bird,
Onto its nest again;
I have not live in vain.
There are many reasons to justify the use of thought-provoking inspirational passages for language teaching/learning:
- Inspirational passages bring the wisdom of the wise and the experience of ages to the young students as signposts for their life.
- Inspirational passages make meaningful and authentic content with universal appeal, which beckon the learners to think deeply about serious issues in life. Moreover, they inspire them to set goals for themselves in life and achieve them against all odds.
- Inspirational teaching content help students overcome or lower motivational barriers and incite them to learning goals.
- Obviously, such insightful content enhances positive attitude and does not encounter psychological resistance because of cultural incompatibility.
- If the teacher has adequate linguistic savvy and sensibility, he can use inspirational passages to teach synonyms, antonyms, sentence structures, pronunciation of words, and a host of other language aspects in context.
So, given their ubiquity and ready availability on the one hand and their high appeal to people, we are not stretching the point if we assert that the genre of inspirational writings is a rich asset for language teachers and material developers in dealing with the ever pesky motivation problem. Some reasons other than those listed above include: they are often highly memorable, they can enhance a learner’s feel for the language; and they can provide a powerful encouragement for reflection, discussion and mental rehearsal.
The use of this text type is not unprecedented in the field of foreign language teaching. Apart from the fact that human interest has always been a critical consideration in material selection and development, some material developers have used this criterion as their main organizing principle guiding their work. In fact, the well-known text-book writer, Alan Maley, introduces being interesting and inspirational as the keynote and the policy line of some of his highly successful textbooks such as Poem into Poem (Alan Maley and Moulding 1985). According to Dhanavel (2008), the problem of motivation in the ESL classroom can be overcome, among other means, by the use of inspirational quotations on the board every day. He provides the following comments on the action research he conducted:
Our experience gave ample scope for motivating the students both intrinsically and extrinsically. The students would surely find the quotations useful in their speaking and writing. When they get some guidance, especially with moral values, for their life, they have intrinsic motivation. These moral values and linguistic skills are very much necessary for their personality development without which they cannot become effective and efficient professionals, let alone leaders and communicators (Dhanavel 2008).
Consequently, the task of motivating the students becomes easier for the teacher who can teach the lessons hour after hour and year after year with pleasure and profit.
Inspirational language teaching and training may not only promote effective learning but also improve retention and achievement. Whilst it is not always easy to identify exactly what makes a particular language learning session inspirational, it is important to reflect carefully on this, in order to maximize motivation and learning. Braude (1994: 19) comments on quotations_ certainly a type of motivational or inspirational language_ as follows:
Many people sprinkle their everyday conversation with quotations. These familiar sayings answer a special need of orators and statesmen, who search for quotations with which they drive home a point or sum up their speeches. Often the fruit of many years’ study is brought together into a single sentence, and nothing adorns a composition or speech better than a fitting quotation.
Farjami (2009) reports on how he used the "amazing power of sayings and quotations and inspired students, to whom the language course meant just a passing score, to open their minds to something in English for the first time. The experience was successful enough to encourage him to build up a bank of student-rated inspirational passages with interest and difficulty rankings. (see Semnan University Project, below). Clearly, we have both language and content in every piece of inspirational language to be used in the ESL classroom. There seems to be great possibilities in inspirational chunks of language to motivate the students and thus get them interested in English language.
Spiritual Intelligence
Even in the western world, the view of a spiritual dimension to humankind is receiving increasing support (Gilder 1997). Toynbee (1948) in his twelve-volume review of human history stated that spiritual teachings provide the seed from which a civilization develops. A number of important psychologists have included humankind's spiritual nature as part of their theory of human behavior (e.g., Gordon Allport, William James, Carl Jung, Abraham Maslow). According to Viktor Frankl, author of Man's Search for Meaning (1963), when faced with a challenge, the most basic of all human wishes is to find a meaning in life to cope with that challenge. The importance of emotional and "spiritual intelligence" of learners (Zohar and Marshall 2000), both as a goal to achieve and as a means for achieving other educational goals, has been emphasized by many psychologists and educational experts. For example Daniel Goleman (1998), in his seminal book, Working with Emotional Intelligence, states that spiritual and emotional level of intelligence really influences one’s level of achievement.
As it may at least partially be true that the majority of learners want to “fill their heart not their money bags”, it is important that we acknowledge humanity's spiritual nature as we search for ways to improve schooling and education. If we recognize that the teaching we provide is a significant influence on the learners who will someday provide leadership for the nation and even the world, we will teach them stuff that is attuned to their deep spiritual needs.
Potter (1994) contends that there is a built-in spiritual centre located among neural connections in the temporal lobes of the brain. According to him, on scans taken with positron emission topography (PET) these neural areas light up whenever research subjects are exposed to discussion of spiritual or religious topics. Neurobiologists have now dubbed the area of the temporal lobes concerned with religious or spiritual experience the ‘God spot’ or the ‘God module’ (Potter 1994). So, it makes sense that educators incorporate such brain-compatible content into the curriculum.
Thinking of these essential underpinnings of human emotion and thought, we can hypothesize why even great ideas or schemes in language teaching sometimes fail, whether it is comprehensible input (Krashen 1985), extensive and narrow reading/listening (Krashen 2011) or CALL-based instruction with quality designs or qualified teachers. The problem is that there should always be a reason to read or listen. And in the case of English for no specific purpose, or absence of content and language integrated learning, which is quite typical in Iran, inspirational messages in the text provide that reason_ the missing link and in-built intrinsic value for those or other schemes.
Certainly, inspirational content is amenable to many limitations that other text types are and should be applied with much practical wisdom on the part of practitioners, e.g., in designing ingenious tasks and activities based on them. However, their obvious potentials make them very user-friendly even for the novice teacher. In fact, with an inspirational passage the learners will be so riveted to the content that they will barely feel the lack of text-based exercises. So, it is not very difficult to have a fruitful enjoyable discussion or gratifying reading with the following passage with little toil on the part of the teacher:
Be careful of your thoughts, for your thoughts inspire your words. Be careful of your words, for your words cause your actions. Be careful of your actions, for your actions become your habits. Be careful of your habits, for your habits build your character. Be careful of your character, for your character decides your destiny.
A feature of this sub-genre is the fact that one can find content appropriate for different levels of proficiency. There are tons of bite-size easy passages such as this:
Watch your… (Frank Outlaw)
Watch your thoughts, for they become words.
Watch your words, for they become actions.
Watch your actions, for they become habits.
Watch your habits, for they become character.
Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.
And there is no short of more challenging texts like this one by Bertrand Russell:
Three passions have governed my life: The longings for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of humankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me here and there over a deep ocean of agony, reaching to the very verge of despair.
Love brings ecstasy and relieves loneliness. In the union of love I have seen in a mystic miniature the prefiguring vision of the heavens that saints and poets have imagined.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of people. I have wished to know why the stars shine.
Love and knowledge led upwards to the heavens, but always pity brought me back to earth; sorrowful feeling, sympathy cries of pain reverberated in my heart of children in famine, of victims tortured and of old people left helpless. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer. This has been my life; I found it worth living.
Inspirational passages provide meaningful and memorable context for vocabulary building. Is the following poem not better than learning words by flashcards?
There is truth, even if everyone lies.
There is laughter, even if everyone cries.
There is kindness, even if everyone is cruel.
There is wisdom, even if everyone is a fool.
There is innocence, even if everyone sins.
There is defeat, even if everyone wins.
There is giving, even if everyone takes.
There is comfort, even if everyone aches.
There is freedom, even if everyone jails.
There is success, even if everyone fails.
There is logic, even if everyone is mad.
There is goodness, even if everyone is bad.
There is hope, even if no one is sure.
There is virtue, even if no one is pure.
There is faith, even if no one prays.
There is law, even if no one obeys.
There is justice, even if no one is fair.
There is God, even if no one is there.
For one thing, the learners form better associations in their memory; for another thing, they build character as well as vocabulary.
The promises and possibilities of inspirational texts encouraged this researcher to develop a mini-corpus of inspirational passages on topics of high human interest, bearing Iranian learners and culture in mind. A huge stockpile of interesting passages, accessed from a variety of sources, was short listed and given to intermediate and higher level English learners to rate for difficulty and interest. 255 passages which on average received the highest scores for interest were selected and arranged, both according to interest scores and difficulty scores, as a mini-corpus. This bank of passages, which is readily available on demand at zzmhadi@yahoo.com, can serve as a resource for language teachers to choose from, considering the needs of their students and their levels of proficiency on the one hand and the interest and difficulty scores of the passages on the other hand.
Practical wisdom tells us if teaching for specific purposes should have needs analysis as the starting point in developing materials for foreign language teaching, materials for teaching language for general purposes should be based on an analysis of deep-seated human spiritual needs as well as the linguistic needs learners get set to satisfy. Using passages with inspirational themes in foreign language teaching will not only help learners achieve the goal of learning the skills and components of language but also it will leave a good taste in the learners' mouth. Additionally, it will be emphasized that "education is not [just] filling a bucket but lighting a fire" and "great teachers inspire", to use the words of William Butler Yeats and William Arthur Ward, respectively.
Braude, J. M. 1994. “Quotations”. In G. Gabianelli (ed.). The New Book of Knowledge, Vol. 16. Danbury, CT: Grolier.
Dhanavel, P. 2009. “Quotations for motivation in the ESL classroom”. UsingEnglish.com. Retrieved [November 2009] from
www.usingenglish.com/teachers/articles/quotation-for-motivation-in-the-classroom.html
Farjami, H. 2009. “The amazing power of sayings and quotations”. Modern English Teacher. 18: 22-24.
Frankl, V. 1963. Man's search for meaning. New York: Pocket Books.
Goleman, D. 1998. Working with emotional intelligences. New York: Bantum Books.
Gilder, G. 1997. The materialist superstition. Seattle, WA: Discovery Institute for Public Policy.
Krashen, S. 1985. The input hypothesis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Krashen, S. 2011. Free voluntary reading. Santa Barbara: ABS-CLIO, Incorporated.
Littlewood, W. 1987. Foreign and second language learning: Language acquisition research and its implications for the classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Maley, A. and Moulding, S. 1985. Poem into poem: Reading and writing poems with students of English. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Potter, V. R.. 1994. “Science and religion must share quest for global survival”. The Scientist, 8:, 1-12.
Toynbee, A. 1948. A study of history. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zohar, D., & Marshall, I. (2000). SQ: Spiritual Intelligence: The Ultimate Intelligence. New York: Bloomsbury.
Please check the How to Motivate your Students course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Building Positive Group Dynamics course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the How to be a Teacher Trainer course at Pilgrims website.
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