Motivating Young Learners and Teenagers - From Research to the Classroom: A Few Ideas
Roger O’Keeffe, Melilla
Roger O’Keeffe has been teaching for nine years. He has taught in Poland, China and Spain. He is currently a centre manager in the British Centre of Melilla, a private language academy. His interests include Task Based Learning, Grammaring, Noticing, etc. He is studying for, and enjoying an MA TESOL at Sheffield Hallam University.
"In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit."
— Albert Schweitzer
Menu
Introduction
Generating motivation
Maintaining motivation
Conclusion
Bibliography and references
Why should we worry about motivation? After all shouldn’t it be up to the student to make sure they come to class in the right frame of mind? Can the presence or absence of motivation make any real difference?
The Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics defines motivation as follows:
Motivation is generally considered to be one of the primary causes of success and failure in second language learning (2002: 344).
So it would seem from this definition that motivation is something we teachers need to take seriously if we are concerned about creating the best possible acquisition/learning environment for our students.
But what is a good motivator? And how can we ‘rekindle the inner fire’? That is what this article sets out to look at. We will look at some of the research in the field of psycholinguistics and see how it could be applied in the classroom.
How to generate motivation would seem like a likely place to begin. Dornyei (2001) argues that motivation goes through a minimum of three phases:
First, motivation needs to be generated. The motivational dimension related to in this initial phase can be referred to as ‘choice motivation’ because the motivation generated then leads to the selection of the goal or task to be pursued. (Dornyei, Z. 2001)
I would suggest that materials needed at this initial phase could take the form of questionnaires or an open forum idea sharing exchange. This would allow the learners to determine what topics they will cover in a task phase, e.g. when introducing the topic of work to a group of teenagers it might be an idea to allow the students to design a questionnaire that they can use to interview each other to determine what the outcome of the task will be (a poster, a written report etc.). By doing this the students are taking a lead role in determining their activities and at the same time are redressing the balance of power in the classroom. This I believe has a very positive effect on motivation as traditionally, teachers were viewed as the power-holders who forced the learners to cover topic areas that may have had little or no relevance to their interests or real world experiences. This sentiment is backed up by Good and Brophy (1994: 228) who note that "the simplest way to ensure that people value what they are doing is to maximise their free choice and autonomy¨. Approaching motivation in this way should automatically incorporate two of the five factors that Schumann (1997) deems important; novelty and pleasantness; novel, because the students should generate new approaches, topic areas etc. that the teacher would not usually employ, and pleasant, because the learners should feel comfortable in their own chosen approach.
Crookes’ and Schmidt’s research (1991) identified three areas that are important to the motivation of learners. The first variable they identified was motivating the students into the lesson, at the beginning and staging remarking on what is forthcoming has been observed to lead to higher levels of interest on the part of the students. For example at the beginning of a class I will always tell the students what we are going to do; if we are at the beginning of a cycle of lessons I will tell them the topic area that we will be dealing with and ask them for any input they might have.
Crookes and Schmidt (1991) go on to argue that to maintain motivation we should vary the activities, tasks, and materials. It has been shown that lessons that always follow the same format can lead to increased levels of boredom and decreased levels of attention. This is an easy trap to fall into if we as teachers always do the things we like or we think the learners will like. I have found that by simply asking for learners’ personal preferences I have uncovered a wealth of ideas that I would never have thought of myself. This is because each group consists of individuals with different learning styles; kinaesthetic, auditory or visual. So for example when doing body parts with young learners I will divide the class into two groups and ask them to write body parts on scraps of paper, each group then elects a ‘body’ who stands at the front of the class then someone will call out a body part and the teams then have to stick the paper to the relevant part of the body. The noise level goes through the roof, so it must be good!
Using co-operative rather than competitive goals helps all students, including the less confident ones, as they all have a vested interest in the outcome and the realisation that what each individual does affects the outcome can lead to an increase in motivation.
When dealing with clothes I will ask the group to make a poster from pictures they have chosen and cut out of magazines. As a group the learners will then write a description of their chosen pictures. As the posters will be displayed in class all the group tend to help each other. For these types of activities I have found that I need to monitor a lot as the stronger students will try to take over and the weaker ones will not benefit from the exercise. This can then be followed in the next class by a ‘fashion show’ performed in front of another group where each individual walks down the catwalk and describes what they are wearing.
Dornyei’s second phase states that the generated motivation needs to be actively maintained and protected while the particular action lasts. This motivational dimension has been referred to as ‘executive motivation’ (or ‘volition’), and is particularly relevant to classroom settings, where students are exposed to a great number of distracting influences, such as of-task thoughts, irrelevant distractions from others, anxiety about the tasks or physical conditions that make it difficult to complete the task.(Dornyei, Z. 2001).
For this second phase the materials and how they are used must reflect the level of the learners. The teacher therefore needs to be very careful not to damage the initial motivation by asking the students to do something too far beyond their developmental capacity which could lead to frustration and de-motivation. It could also damage the positive feelings created in the initial phase and create an unwillingness to participate or contribute ideas. This meets another of Schumann’s criteria coping potential. With this in mind I would argue that this is an item that cannot be listed as it is very group specific. However, an example of this could be asking very young learners to make posters of animals where the first stage would be to draw the animals they want and later to label them and after a further input/noticing session ask them to write basic descriptions. This is something I have done with a group of five year olds and they found it both stimulating and interesting. Also the fact that they were producing a poster that was to be displayed included another of Schumann’s prerequisites goal or need. This could also lead to an increase in motivation for the next class/task as the students should feel successful as they have completed and displayed their work. And as Willis argues … success and satisfaction are key factors in sustaining motivation (1996; 14)
This sense of success leads to Dornyei’s third phase;
…following the completion of the action – termed ‘motivational retrospection’ – which concerns the learners’ retrospective evaluation of how things went. The way students process their past experiences in this retrospective will determine the kind of activities they will be motivated to pursue in the future ( Dornyei, Z. 2001)
The second and third phases go a long way to meeting the last of Schumann’s criteria that being self and social image. If for example a weaker learner has been involved in the successful completion of a project/task that individual will grow in self esteem and therefore confidence which in turn could motivate the learner to take on a more demanding or active role in the next task. I would suggest giving (or letting learners design) feedback forms could be a good way for the learners to focus their thoughts and could be used for a whole class discussion on how the students view the materials and their progress. This could help to bring forward any problems students may be encountering and stop resentment or feelings of frustration.
We also need to consider how our learners’ view our culture as this can have an effect on their motivation. How is the language/culture viewed at home and by their peer groups?
Children as well as adults are sensitive to social dynamics and power relationships (Lightbown, Spada, 1999: 57). Here they are commenting on the motivation involved in learning a second language that may be perceived as a minority or majority language and how this effects the motivation of the students to learn. In my context I teach Spanish young learners and the perceived impression (imposed by their parents) is that English is necessary to get a good job. In this context it could be argued that English is seen as a majority language and desirable to learn, but under sufferance. However, if children are given the right culturally rich classroom environment this possibly negative influence on motivation can be counteracted e.g. using nursery rhymes and songs creates an interest in the culture. For older learners this can be done using music, articles relating to teenagers and their concerns e.g. A Day In The Life Of … etc. A good way of motivating teenage students into the culture is to get them reading blogs of real teenagers in the target culture. This allows them to see the similarities and differences in cultures in ‘real time’ i.e. not something from an outdated textbook. A nice follow on would be to get them to write their own blogs.
I believe that the materials teachers use can have an effect on these motivational traits. Many learners only contact with the culture of the target language is through the media and their teacher. Therefore I believe it is vitally important that the teacher promotes a positive image of the L2’s culture. This can be achieved in part by the materials selected by the teacher. For example, using models of real language that reflect the interests of the students, this could take the form of hip – hop lyrics and vocabulary for teens (translating the Hip-hop lexis into ‘real’ English can be a daunting yet rewarding task), newspaper or internet articles on ‘Life in Britain, USA etc’, Fairy Tales, myths and legends for younger learners.
In conclusion I would argue that a good motivator needs to take into account the different learning styles within a group, their needs, wishes and interests and balance this with the expectations of the curriculum. This can quite easily be done by designing questionnaires aimed at discovering the students’ learning styles and likes/dislikes, giving feedback forms on how they perceive their development and your performance and acting on the sensible suggestions and by generally listening to what your students have to say. This should then lead the teacher to design more student friendly classes where the learners feel that their contributions are welcomed and as such they (the students) are viewed as collaborators in the learning/acquisition process.
Cook, V. 3rd Edition, 2001. Second Language Learning and Language Teaching. London: Hodder Headline
Crookes, G and Schmidt, R. 1991. Motivation: ‘Reopening the research agenda’. Language Learning 41/4: 469 – 512.
Dornyei, Z. 2001. Teaching and Researching Motivation. Harlow: Longman.
Good, T. and Brophy, J. 1994. Looking in Classrooms. New York: Harper Collins.
Lightbown, P. Spada, N. 1999. How Languages are Learned. Oxford: OUP.
Moon, J. 2000. Children Learning English. Oxford: Macmillan Publishers
Richards, J. Schmidt, R. 3rd edition, 2002. Longman dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited.
Schmitt, R. (Ed). 2002. An Introduction To Applied Linguistics. London: Hodder Headline
Schumann, J.H. 1997. The Nuerobiology of Affect in Language. Oxford: Blackwell
Willis, J. 1996. A Framework for Task Based Learning. Harlow: Longman
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