it come from? Where does it go?
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.
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
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:
natural interest: intrinsic
teacher/institution/employment: extrinsic reward
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
M. P. and Littlejohn, A. P. 2000. Classroom Decision-Making.
Cambridge University Press.
1990. Teaching children to think, Basil
R. C. 1985.
Social psychology and language learning.
|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|
©Andrew Littlejohn 2001. All rights reserved.