A few road-tested methods of motivating students to engage in language lessons.
Notes from a young teacher.

Katarzyna Niedzwiecka

Katarzyna Niedzwiecka holds a Master's degree in Psychology. Teaches English and English through Psychology (CLIL) at the English Language Centre of Warsaw School of Social Psychology, Department in Sopot, Poland.
E-mail: kniedzwiecka@swps.edu.pl

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On being annoying for 50 zl and 10 gr
Beware of ways in which a helpful trick can backfire
Throw out an anchor
Give children a smart choice
Tokens
References

I tutor an adorable eight year old named Filip. He is very bright and well-behaved. Well, most of the time. He is usually very motivated (he takes great pride in being able to communicate in English at such a young age) and is therefore very focused during his lessons with me. If he is ever horsing around too much it is usually enough if I look at him dagger. Or simply remind him that if he just focuses on the activity we are doing time will pass by much faster and he will soon be able to do whatever he wants. We have a good rapport and usually time flies.

But on that particular Thursday evening Filip was determined to test my limits. It was as if he was on a quest to find out how much bad behavior I would stand or what I would do if he crossed the line. Although he has no difficulty reading in English he is not very keen on it. That day when I asked Filip to read a short story aloud he kindly obliged but began reading sentences backwards. He was very happy with himself for misbehaving especially when he saw that it made me angry. I wasn't used to him misbehaving so I didn't immediately know how to react. When I scolded him he said that I couldn't be angry with him because he did in fact read the sentences. I told him I was upset with his behavior but he didn't seem to care. In fact he even began spelling aloud particular letters of words making it impossible to understand anything. This went on for several minutes despite my urging him to stop goofing around and read his sentences of the story properly (we always read stories together, he reads one sentence and I read the next and so on). But nothing worked. Seeing me helpless just seemed to spur him on.

Finally, out of bare desperation, I decided to play a psychological trick on him. I asked him if he would agree to do the same annoying thing he had just been doing for the previous couple of minutes if I paid him 50 zlotys for it. He looked at me in disbelief, his big blue eyes wide open, then quickly looked around the living room as if he was checking if anyone from his family had heard me offer him 50 zlotys for anything, much less for disruptive classroom behaviour. "Sure, I will." he said smiling. "But will you really pay me 50 zlotys ?" he asked. "Yes" I replied. "But you have to do it for a full 5 minutes. Deal ?". "Deal." he replied. I then opened my wallet (where I did have 50 zlotys), quickly pretended to search through different compartments and said to him "Shoot, buddy. I could swear I had 50 zlotys in here but now I see I've only got 10 gr. Would you do it for 10 gr?" Filip looked at me with disillusionment and annoyance as if asking "Do you even have to ask?" No, he wouldn't do it for so little money. "Can you read normally then?" I asked. Yes, he could. And just like that he began to read normally and we continued with our lesson. As we were reading the story he occasionally stopped and peered at me intensively probably trying to figure out what had just happened but I doubt he had any idea. And I wasn't going to tell him.

Now I have to say I don't normally employ such disciplining methods. It was a one time brainwave I had which reflected my sheer desperation in that particular situation. I don't actually approve morally of such tactics - to me they are a sign of the teacher's complete helplessness. And I would never approve of any child manipulation, however subtle. After reflecting on my beahviour I was actually a bit ashamed. So when I was asked to write and article giving examples of other such tricks I was not sure it was a very good idea. Writing about ways a psychologist (I graduated from the Psychology department) creeps up on the unsuspecting student ? For an e-zine titled "Humanising Language Teaching"? Really??? But then I realized that most such tricks don't actually involve student manipulation, they are just results of extensive studies into the mechanisms which govern human motivation.

So I took my psychology textbooks of the shelf and looked for examples of other so-called psychological tricks which can be applied to language teaching, especially that of children. Here is what I found.

The trick I used on Filip turned out to be based on an early 20th century Jewish legend I read at university while studying for an exam in the psychology of emotions and motivation. In the legend, as told by Nathan Asparel (1948), a Jewish tailor set up a small workshop on the main street of his town. But there were some young boys who were determined to drive him out of the town. So they would gather in front of the workshop and scream "Jew! Jew!". The children's behavior upset the tailor very much and he spent many sleepless nights trying to resolve the problem. And one day he had a brilliant idea. In the morning he approached the boys and made them an unusual offer - from that day on each boy who called him a Jew would be paid 10 cents. Unsurprisingly, the boys were thrilled with the proposal and screamed "Jew! Jew!" even louder than usual. But the next day the tailor told them that he could no longer afford to pay them 10c and could only offer them 5c. The boys agreed to the 5c and still gathered around his workshop. But after the next few days the tailor only gave them 1c each. The boys were angry and one of them asked the tailor "How come you only gave us 1c today?" The tailor replied that he simply couldn't afford to pay them any more money. One of the boys then asked him angrily "Do you really think we'll keep calling you a "Jew "for as little as 1c!?". "Well then, you'll have to stop, won't you ?" replied the tailor. Needless to say, he never saw the boys again.

The tailor in the legend unknowingly made use of a well-studied psychological principle which governs human motivation. According to this principle it possible to eradicate an undesired behaviour exhibited by a child by initially rewarding it with something that is of value to the child and then suddenly, or gradually for that matter, taking that tangible award away. Paradoxically in such a situation the child no longer feels motivated to do something it was initially motivated to do for no tangible reward at all aside from the sheer satisfaction derived from the activity. However, it's important to know that this same principle can also backfire in a learning environment.

Researchers Lepper and Nisbett (1973) observed preschool children as they were happily drawing in their free time between scheduled activities. Then they gave half the children a gold framed diploma complete with a blue ribbon as a reward for their efforts. The other half were not given anything for their pictures and went home empty handed. A week later the researchers observed the two groups of children again. To their surprise the children who had received a reward for their drawings were less likely to spontaneously engage in drawing than children who hadn't received any award. Even though the children who had been awarded still drew pictures from time to time they did so less frequently than before. The researchers concluded that the tangible reward questioned the children's inner motivation to draw for the pure pleasure of doing so. They fell victim to the over justification effect. According to this theory, if we engage in an activity not only because we derive pleasure from it but also because we know we will receive a tangible reward for doing so, we have a strong tendency to devalue our inner motivation and rationalize that we're really just after the tangible award. And like with all behaviors reinforced externally, once the reinforcement is gone, so is the motivation.

So does this mean that athletes who are awarded for a good performance will no longer be motivated to practice their sport? Or that a teacher cannot rewards students with good grades without killing their inner interest in the subject being taught? No, it all depends on how the student perceives the reward. If tangible rewards are seen merely as a means by which somebody controls our behavior it may question our inner motivation. But if, on the other hand, we perceive rewards as a form of feedback on our performance it will not necessarily question our inner motivation. A good grade for an assignment is not just a means of acknowledging and rewarding students' skills and effort but also confirms that they have developed a particular skill or that their effort put into completing the assignment was worthwhile. Grades can guide a student through the process of developing their skills. So it really all boils down to subjective appraisal - if students perceive attaining good grades as a goal in itself there may be problems, but if students see good grades primarily as a source of guidance and an acknowledgement of their efforts but at the same time they have their our own inner reasons for developing certain skills then good grades will probably not make them question their motivation (Mietzel, 1998).

Another trick worth using is one I learned about from a colleague at work. It makes use of the anchoring heuristic. It has been proven that "we tend to base estimates and decisions on known 'anchors' or familiar positions, with an adjustment relative to this start point. We are better at relative thinking than absolute thinking. If asked whether the population of Turkey was greater or less than 30 million, you might give one or the other answer. If then asked what you thought the actual population was, you would very likely guess somewhere around 30 million, because you have been anchored by the previous answer." (Kahneman and Tversky, 1973) So when my friend Wojtek wants his students to do 3 exercises at home he tells them that they will have to do five exercises. They usually complain when they hear that so then he says 'Okay, make it three." By anchoring them at five he gives them a sense of satisfaction that they fought for fewer tasks. He says this trick works best when used rarely.

A psychology instructor at my university taught me this next trick. She had a small daughter who like many little children hated taking baths so instead of asking her "Would you like to take a bath?" which always resulted in her daughter screaming at the top of her lungs 'No!" she would rather ask her daughter 'Would you prefer a bubble bath or one with coloured water?". This way there was no discussing whether her daughter would take a bath but the little girl would get so excited that she got to make a choice about something so important that she kind of forgot that she was choosing from two things she essentially didn't want to do at all. But at the tender age of 4 years old it didn't occur to her that she was being tricked into doing something she didn't want to do. Like all kids, especially those between the ages of 3-6, she felt very important to have been given the opportunity to decide about something as important as taking a bath. I frequently use this trick with Filip when we practice reading - I never ask him if he would like to read. Instead I always give him a choice of two stories and he decides which one we will read. It is not really a trick per se but somehow when I use it he seems to accept the activity more.

And last but not least, a motivating method worth mentioning is that which makes use of tokens and the Premack prinicple. As we read in a chapter on behavioral theories of learning, "according to psychologist David Premack, more-preferred activities can be used to reinforce less-preferred activities. According to the Premack principle, any higher-frequency behavior that is contingent on a lower-frequency behavior is likely to increase the rate of lower-frequency behavior. Thus the teacher would set up a situation in which students, when they complete the less-preferred activity are permitted to participate in a more-preferred activity." (http://scied.gsu.edu). This method was originally used to motivate hyperactive children to focus on school activities. The brain of clinically hyperactive children is wired in such a way that it takes very little to distract them when they are trying to focus on any language activity - reading, writing, speaking A plane flying over the school, someone talking, a bug crawling on the floor of the classroom, their own daydreams - all these things and many more can easily distract a hyperactive child from doing a school activity. Their ability to inhibit potentially distracting stimuli is very underdeveloped which makes educating such children very difficult, especially in a traditional classroom where there are many children to manage at the same time.

So behavioral psychologists came up with the idea of tokens. If a child engages in a desired school behavior - e.g. focuses for a full five minutes on a Math activity - or refrains from doing something inappropriate - doesn't talk to a classmate during self-study time - it receives a token. After collecting a certain number of such tokens (usually 5 or 10, however the younger the child the smaller the number of tokens that has to be collected) the child can exchange them for the permission to do an activity it really enjoys- playing on the playground, practicing a favorite sport, watching a cartoon of it's choice. This method proved to be enormously effective in managing hyperactive as well as autistic children who both have serious motivational deficiencies which pose difficulties in the school environment. However, for this method to be effective, we have to carefully assess the number of tokens a child has to collect in order to exchange them for a rewarding activity. Too few will give us too little time to teach the child what we need to teach them, whereas too many can discourage the child who might feel it is too difficult or nearly impossible to collect the needed number of tokens. We must also make sure that the behavior exchanged for the tokens is something that will really motivate the child to focus on the desired school activity. A given activity will be perceived as most rewarding if the child not only enjoys it but also hasn't had the opportunity to engage in it for some period of time. Playing basketball will be a much more rewarding activity if we are keen on it but haven't had the opportunity to play for a few weeks than if we enjoy it but play as often as we want.

Mietzel, Gerd - "Wprowadzenie do psychologii", GWP 1998
http://www.changingminds.com
http://scied.gsu.edu

Editorial: In Poland the currency is 'zloty' and 'grosz'; 'zl' stands for 'zloty' , 'gr' for 'groszy'. Roughly speaking 50 zl equals 10 pounds, and 10 groszy 1 penny.

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