This article was
originally published in ENGLISH TEACHING
professional, Issue 19, March 2001. ©
Copyright Andrew Littlejohn. Further articles and resources by Andrew Littlejohn are
available at www.AndrewLittlejohn.net
In
recent years, I have had the privilege to visit many classes around the world, to talk to
teachers and sit in on their lessons. I
remember very clearly one experience in particular which started me thinking about the
whole question of motivation.
I
was visiting a secondary school, and my first visit was to a first year class of 11-12
year olds, early in their school year. As
soon as you opened the door, you could feel and see the motivation to learn in these
students. Big, bright eyes, and smiles, eager
to show the visitor what they had learned. They
had been looking forward to the visit by ‘the Englishman’ and now the moment had
arrived. The bubbling energy of these
students was overwhelming, and so too was their desire to learn English.
Next
lesson, I went a little further along the corridor to visit a second year class, a year
older. Here, the tone was very different
– more purposeful but more subdued with none of the spark that I had seen just
before. Their eyes no longer had a twinkle
and the smiles were now replaced by a somewhat expressionless look on some students. We had a pleasant encounter, and they read short
pieces of their work to me but the overall tone was rather polite.
Next,
I visited a third year class, and here I found a quite different atmosphere. At front of the class, there were a few students
who were clearly interested in the visit by ‘the Englishman’. We talked about
the things they liked and disliked in learning English and their interests. It was, however, always the same students who
talked and most of the students remained silent throughout.
More significantly, there were two students who clearly couldn’t care less
– or so it appeared. One of them,
sitting at the back of the class, had his feet on the edge of his desk, not a book, a pen
or a piece of paper near him. He was
removing what looked like motor oil from his nails. Every
so often he would shout something out to another student, and receive a glare from the
teacher. The other student, also at the
back, was evidentially asleep, with his head flopped over his desk, and no sign of any
school equipment near him.
Many
teachers, I am sure, will recognise the scenarios here.
They are, in fact, situations that I have since seen time and time again in my
visits to schools. Many teachers, too, will
also recognise the sketch of the ‘couldn’t care less – don’t want to
learn’ students. The most striking thing for me, however, was the transition from the
1st year students –all seemingly eager and energetic- to the wide
differences amongst the 3rd year class, with some students now apparently
completely negative about their learning. Assuming
that the 3rd year class had once been like the 1st year class, what
had happened in the intervening three years? Where
did the students’ initial motivation come from? And where did it go?
It
would be difficult, if not impossible, to point to a single factor which would account for
the apparent changing levels of motivation and involvement that I had witnessed. As all teachers know, and as Marion
Williams in an earlier article (ETP, Issue 13) has explained, there are many, many factors
which affect students’ commitment to study. Many things – perhaps most –
are beyond our control as language teachers, and fall outside the confines of the few
lessons that we have with them in a week. Home
background, physical tiredness, events in their personal life, health, previous
educational experience, personality and the onset of adolescence, are just some of the
factors that can affect how individual students appear to us in our classes. Nevertheless, I believe that in many cases, the
explanation of why the smile disappears from the faces of some students – whatever
their age - may indeed lie in their experience of their English classes – in short,
in how their classes are organised.
In
very general terms, educational psychologists point to three major sources of motivation
in learning (Fisher, 1990). Simply put, these
are:
1 The learner’s natural interest: intrinsic satisfaction
2 The teacher/institution/employment: extrinsic
reward
3 Success
in the task: combining satisfaction and reward
Sad though it may be, we must, I believe, recognise that only a
relatively small number of students get a sense of intrinsic satisfaction from
learning English. For the vast majority of
people, language is not, in itself, very interesting, and it is unlikely to spark
and, still less, to sustain motivation. For
some older learners, the satisfaction of learning and using a foreign language may be
connected to what Gardener (1985) has called an ‘integrative motivation’ –
a desire to identify with the culture of the foreign language – but this is not
widespread and it is not likely to be the case with younger learners. Some teachers of younger students endeavour
to relate to what they see as their pupils’ sense of intrinsic satisfaction by using
games, songs and puzzles in the class. Often
these have a positive impact in raising the motivation of the pupils – but the effect
is usually temporary, and once they return to normal classroom work, the effect wears off. In general, then, the learner’s natural
interest is not, therefore, something which we can rely on to generate sustained
motivation in language learning.
Aware of these facts, many teachers, and indeed whole educational
systems, turn to a second source of motivation, extrinsic reward, and its opposite,
extrinsic punishment, as a means of
motivating students. In the classroom, for
example, teachers may ‘reward’ students with good marks, or, in effect, punish
other students with low marks. ‘Better’
students may be rewarded by being given more advanced work to do, or by being placed in a
higher level group, which increases their sense of self-worth. The principal problem in this approach, however,
is that rewards only lead to sustained motivation if you actually get them. For the failing student, unlikely to get rewards,
it does not take long to work out that it is always someone else who gets the rewards
– no matter how hard he or she works. In
this case, the reward system itself can be demotivating for the weaker students. The
increase in the motivation of the better students is more or less proportional to the
decrease in motivation of the weaker students.
While teachers and school systems have drawn on both of the first
two sources of motivation, the third source is perhaps under-exploited in language
teaching. This is the simple fact of success,
and the effect that this has on our view of what we do.
As human beings, we generally like what we do well, and are therefore more likely
to do it again, and put in more effort.
If we put in more effort, we generally get better, and so this
sustains our motivation. Feelings of being able to do something and feelings of sustained
motivation can therefore be linked into an upward spiral which causes us to commit
ourselves to what are we doing and to improve.
Unfortunately
for many students, this spiral relationship between motivation and ability can often
function in reverse. Few people like to fail
and we generally avoid circumstances in which we anticipate failure. In the classroom, this can mean that students who
develop an image of themselves as ‘no good at English’ will simply avoid
situations which tell them what they already know – that they aren’t any good at
English. Feelings of failure,
particularly early on in a student’s school career, can therefore lead to a downward
spiral of a self- perception of low ability – low motivation – low effort –
low achievement – low motivation – low achievement, and so on. It is the existence of these upward and
downward spirals in the motivation-ability relationship that explain a situation commonly
found by teachers. In many classes where
there are differing levels of student ability, the gap between the ‘weaker’
students and the ‘stronger’ students appears to get wider and wider over time,
as some students thrive in an upward spiral, whilst other students actually deteriorate in
a downward spiral.
The
attempt by some students to avoid recurring failure suggests that we need to rethink some
of the beliefs that we may have about them. While
it may be true that the students with their feet on the desk at the back of the class
really aren’t interested in learning, it may equally be true that what they are
actually trying to do is to avoid repeated failure – by pretending that they
don’t care. It is their sense of
self-esteem that is at stake here. By
pretending that they aren’t interested and don’t want to learn, they can protect
themselves from seeing themselves as failure.
Such extreme displays of disinterest or rejection of learning are probably at the
bottom end of a downward motivation-ability spiral. For
many students, the spiral will have begun long before, as they learned to see themselves
as failures, and then began to engage in various kinds of avoidance strategies –
sitting at the back of the class, choosing a seat where they wouldn’t be noticed,
misbehaving, pretending illnesses at crucial moments such as tests, and blaming failure on
the teacher or the school or other students.
What
all this points to, I think, is that we shouldn’t underestimate the importance of
self-esteem and a sense of competence in language learning as crucial factors affecting
motivation. For the failing student, in
particular, it is important that we try to develop their sense of success and a feeling
that they can do something, rather than a feeling than they can’t.
In
practical terms, this means that we need to be sensitive to the psychology of language
learning. When we plan a lesson, devise a
test, or use a particular type of exercise, we need to ask ourselves a very important
question: how will the weaker students feel if they can’t do this? Let me give an example. One of the commonest exercises used in language
classrooms is the gap-fill. This is a text with every 7th or so word missing,
which the students have to supply. Confident,
motivated students who have a history of success are likely to approach such exercises
feeling that they have done these exercises before and, as they have usually done well,
they will probably be able to do this one too. And,
if they do complete the exercise successfully they will have in front of them confirmation
of what they already knew, and their confidence and motivation are renewed again. Weaker students, however, may have exactly
the opposite experience. Previous failure may create a lack of confidence as they approach
the task, and if they find that they can only complete one or two of the gaps correctly,
then once again they are presented with a picture of what they can’t do –
and so the spiral relationship of motivation-ability takes another step downward.
I
do not want to suggest by this that we should never use gap-fill exercises. Used appropriately, they can serve a very useful
purpose. The basic point I wish to make,
however, is that there is a psychology involved in everything we do in the classroom, and
that this is concerned with the students’ feelings of success/failure, high/low
self-esteem, high/low confidence and this has a direct impact on motivation. Viewed in this way, we may be able to understand
some of the reasons why, over time, motivation may fail, and explain the differences in
the three classrooms I described at the beginning of this article. It suggests that, where we see students beginning
to fail and beginning to lose motivation, one route to repairing the situation may lie in
choosing tasks which we believe the students can do, in order to develop a sense of
competence and confidence. It also suggests
that all students need to feel a sense of progress and that their efforts actually lead to
results.
One
important element in shaping the students’ view of themselves is the feedback that we
give them. Research has shown that even
very young children, in their first years at school, able to identify who the
‘clever’ pupils are and who the ‘not very clever’ pupils are. They do this by monitoring the teacher’s oral
feedback, and develop a fairly clear picture of where they stand in the classroom league
table. The importance of this in shaping the
pupils’ self-esteem, feelings of competence and motivation cannot be underestimated. It suggests that we need to be very careful about
how we give feedback, who gets praise and who doesn’t.
It also suggests that we need to be careful about the type of feedback that
we give students, and whether it recognises and values effort, content, ideas and
potential.
To
end this short article, I have given a list of some practical suggestions which you may
like to experiment with, but you will find more examples and practical accounts in Breen
and Littlejohn, 2000. There is no ‘magic formula’ for sustaining motivation in
learning. As the first point in the list of
ideas says, we need to experiment and take risks. The
starting point, however, needs to be to try and understand why some students are
not motivated and not simply blame them for not being interested. If we start from the assumption, which I believe
is true, that all human beings in the right circumstances are naturally motivated to
learn, we need to ask ourselves: where does that motivation go?
Bibliography
Breen M. P. and Littlejohn,
A. P. 2000. Classroom Decision-Making. Cambridge
University Press.
Fisher,
Robert. 1990. Teaching children to think, Basil Blackwell
Gardener, R. C. 1985. Social
psychology and language learning. Edward
Arnold
1 Experiment, take
risks. Vary the kinds of things you do in
the classroom. See what different students respond to best. For example, try short
stories, films, classroom drama, songs, projects, grammar exercises,
dictations,…
2 Choose
‘larger’ tasks. Chose tasks
that give students more ‘psychological space’ to plan their own work, set their
own pace, make their own decisions about how and what they do. For example, process
writing and simulations.
3 Choose open-ended
tasks. Tasks that different people can
respond to in different ways, where the absence of a ‘single right answer’ means
that everybody’s work can be valued. For
example, making posters, writing poems, creating designs and describing them.
4 Provide choice. If people are involved in deciding what to do,
they are usually more committed to it. Instead
of saying ‘do this’, say ‘you can choose exercise 3, 5 or 9. Or if
you’d like to do something else, ask me.’
5 Involve students in
classroom decision-making. Many of the
decisions that teachers make can often be shared with the students, without any risks to
the course as whole. You might be able to
share decisions about when homework is set, how long they will spend on a particular task,
what they will do next lesson, and so on.
6 Find out what students
think. Find out if students think they
need more practice, if they have suggestions of their own, if they find things easy or
difficult, boring or interesting. You could
place a ‘suggestion box’ in your class, or write an open-ended letter that
students could complete with their ideas, or devise short questionnaires.
7 Think about how you
give feedback and what you give feedback on. If
you can identify students who are beginning to sink, try to identify aspects that you can
praise and encourage. Instead of just giving
a low mark, explain to the students, in concrete terms, what they could do to improve it
next time.
8 Communicate a sense of
optimism in learning. Communicate a belief that everyone can learn. Encourage students to try, to take risks without
fear of losing marks or feeling stupid. Show them how much they have learned. Offer
help as they ask for it.
| Andrew Littlejohn teaches for the Institute of Education, University of London, and is the author of a number of coursebooks including Cambridge English for Schools (CUP), a course for secondary-aged students which integrates English with wider educational aims. Other articles and a complete on-line A-Z of ELT methodology:are available at www.AndrewLittlejohn.net |