HLT Magazine, March 02 : Publications

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Humanising Language Teaching
Year 4; Issue 1; March 02

Motivational Strategies in the Language Classroom

Reviewed by the author.

by Zoltán Dörnyei.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001;
pp vii + 155; ISBN 0-521-79377-7 (paper).

Language teachers frequently use the term 'motivation' when they describe successful or unsuccessful learners. This reflects our intuitive belief that during the lengthy and often tedious process of mastering a foreign/second language (L2), the learner's enthusiasm, commitment and persistence are key determinants of success or failure. Indeed, in the vast majority of cases learners with sufficient motivation can achieve a working knowledge of an L2, regardless of their language aptitude, whereas without sufficient motivation even the brightest learners are unlikely to persist long enough to attain any really useful language. This being the case, teacher skills in motivating learners should be seen as central to teaching effectiveness. Indeed, research has shown that for many teachers problems about motivating pupils are the second most serious source of difficulty (after maintaining classroom discipline), preceding other obviously important issues such as the effective use of different teaching methods, a knowledge of the subject matter, and the capable use of textbooks and curriculum guides. If you have ever tried to teach a language class with reluctant, lethargic or uncooperative students, you will know from bitter personal experience that researchers got it right this time (for a review of L2 motivation research, see Zoltán Dörnyei: Teaching and Researching Motivation; Longman, 2001).

In the light of the importance attached to motivation, it is hard to believe that until the end of the 1980's there had been hardly any attempts in the psychological literature to design motivational strategies for classroom application, and in language teaching methodology it was not until the mid-1990's that the first descriptions of practical classroom techniques started to appear in print. Obviously, researchers had been far more interested to find out what motivation was than how it could be promoted. During the past 6-8 years, however, things have finally started to change. More and more articles and books have been published with the word 'motivating' in their title, as if a new spirit had entered the profession, urging scholars to 'stick their neck out and see what we've got'. And, luckily, what we've got is nothing to be ashamed of. There is a growing set of core knowledge in motivation research that has stood the test of time and which can therefore be safely translated into practical terms. With this in mind, two years ago I set out to produce a summary of this practical knowledge, and the result has been a book entitled Motivational Strategies in the Language Classroom. In this, I provide a comprehensive review of the literature and summarise my own relevant experience as a language teacher, teacher trainer and researcher.

This book is the first of its kind in the second/foreign language (L2) field that is entirely devoted to discussing motivational strategies (i.e. methods and techniques to generate and maintain the learners' motivation). The book has been intended to be very practical in nature. An initial chapter on motivation theories is followed by four chapters focusing on different aspects of a motivational teaching practice, listing a wide range of classroom ideas:

Creating the basic motivational conditions.
Generating initial student motivation.
Maintaining and protecting motivation.
Encouraging positive retrospective self-evaluation.

These chapters are further broken down to more specific sections, ranging from "Making the teaching materials relevant to the learners" through "Setting specific learner goals" to "Increasing learner satisfaction".

The final, concluding chapter of the book pulls all the threads together and addresses the crucial question of what might be the best way of establishing a motivation-sensitive teaching practice. There is so much for L2 teachers to pay attention to in the classroom – language content, teaching methodology, timing, administration, discipline, etc. – that for many of us taking on another onerous 'burden' (i.e. to be on a constant 'motivational alert') may be asking for too much. So what do we do? I believe that what we should aim for is to become a 'good enough motivator' rather than striving unreasonably to achieve 'Supermotivator' status. Although Motivational strategies in the Language Classroom contains over 100 practical suggestions, I don't think that we have to apply all of them to do a decent job – personally, I have consistently used only a fraction of the strategies discussed. What we need is quality rather than quantity: A few well-chosen strategies that suit both us and our learners might take us beyond the threshold of the 'good enough motivator', creating an overall positive motivational climate in the classroom. Indeed, some of the most motivating teachers often rely on a few basic techniques! Therefore, the book ends with outlining a stepwise approach to select our own set of personalised motivational techniques that would suit our teaching style and the learner group well.

Obviously, as the author, it is difficult for me to judge how effectively the book does what it promises. I have tried to give the text three features that I feel are important, namely that it should be relatively short (because few of us have much time to read besides our main job), systematic (because there is not much point in providing background material if it needs to be supplemented with other sources to get the full picture) and interesting (because I dislike boring books – although I admit that it is not that easy to write a 'page-turner' on motivation…). And with regard to the motivational strategies presented, all I can say is that they have been found to work with many teachers and learner groups before and are therefore worthy of consideration. To finish with a quote on the possibility of a motivational teaching approach by two American researchers, McCombs and Pope, "We have seen this approach work, and we are excited about its possibilities. We invite you to explore this perspective with us".

Zoltan Dornyei ( Feb 2002)

Humanising your Coursebook

Reviewed by the author.

by Mario Rinvolucri

ETp-Delta, 2002 13.25 GB pounds . ISBN 0 954198 60 3

As a young teacher I used to be an avid user of coursebooks, thumbing relentlessly through the teacher notes and trying the suggestions out in class.

And then I began to realise the major downsides of coursebook-based teaching and began to try and work much more from the students, from their ideas, feelings, wishes and fantasies.

Within this student-focused frame I went on to collaborate in the writing of a dozen or so Teacher Resource books, some of which have been popular, such as Grammar Games, CUP, 1985.

Recently I have come to realise how hard it is for teachers to marry up their coursebooks with this or that Teacher's Resource book and so decided to write a Help Book that dovetailed much better with the coursebook than any of my previous books have done.

And this is Humanising your Coursebook.

It's the kind of book you might want to have open on your desk next to the coursebook with its double page spread of Teacher Notes one side and Student Materials the other.

HYC is organised so you know where to dip into to glean ideas for different parts of your lesson: here are its sections:

The book offers you a grand total of 150 activities ( not the 95 erroneously mentioned on the back cover of the book) and most of them require hardly any preparation:

Here is a taster from the "open" grammar section;

Add words to a dictation

Select two or three paragraphs of the main unit text for dictation.

Tell the students they are going to take the dictation down, leaving one word spaces between each word.
When you have dictated a sense group or a sentence, tell them to add one extra word to what you have just dictated.
After the dictation, ask half a dozen people around the class to read out what they have written. This often gives you the chance to do light, quick correction of grammar points that are not clear to the students. With the speed of the dictation and their hurried additions, their grammar misapprehensions tend to surface.

Variations:

Ask students to add:
two words
consecutive words in one position
an adjective
a colour adjective
an adverb

Ask students to take away:
one word
two words
a conjunction

You may decide to change the instructions after each sense-group or sentence.

So much for the background to the book in my own development as a teacher, and so much for the book's contents and organisation. How, though, can I evaluate it?
Hard.

Let me duck the task and get a colleague, Simon Marshall, to give his reactions after trying out a dozen exercises from the book with State teachers in Hongkong, people who teach large classes: Simon writes in a letter to me: " Mario. this book you have written is fantastically relevant to those who have lots of people to teach at one time. It also places you, for me, back firmly in the cthonic ( "how the classroom is" and less fugitive to the etherial classroom of "how things should be".
Less opaquely, this book has got mainstream bollocks and is less sullied by SEAL-like rarified "humanism".
(Simon Marshall is currently director of teacher training at Pilgrims.)

I will regard this book as having been successful, if, by 2010, there are other better books that act as "independent" guides to how to use a coursebook. By "independent" I mean not written by the coursebook authors and outside and beyond the scope of the Teacher's Book they write. This type of methodological guide ( of which, I guess, HYC is the first example) should seriously prolong the useful life of coursebooks.

This book is available at a special discounted price to HLT readers until 30 April 2002 - Click here to find out more.