How much does motivation matter? Should a course instructor be concerned with the motivation of his/her students? Is it course instructors’ role to strengthen the motivation? How to encourage intensive work? By threatening the students? Or perhaps by offering a small bribe? What are motivators and how they work? Although those are relevant questions, we frequently lack time or energy to think those issues over. Let’s not leave them unanswered. Let’s try to analyse them together.
Why do we need motivation?
Doesn’t it suffice that a course instructor transfers knowledge, assigns homework and verifies its effects? To find an answer to this questions, we will make a reference, perhaps slightly perversely, to a sector very different from educational one. And here we mean secret services, for which only the strongest and most enduring people are selected, in a nutshell: James Bond characters. During an examination for secret services, the candidates take part in a run lasting several dozen hours – they have to perform various tasks, crawl, overcome obstacles, swim, not infrequently in the state of extreme exhaustion – almost without sleep and food. Why does this happen in such difficult conditions?
From the viewpoint of recruiters, it is of greatest importance to test whether a given person resigns before the end, deciding they have no more strength left or finishes the run. What is more, those managing the tests all the time demotivate the contestants: “Whoever has had enough and wants to return to warm bad at home, can withdraw at any point”, “If you are hungry, back off and go home to eat”. They know that only the best-motivated ones will remain, and those are the people commandoes need. If the quoted example seems abstract, let’s admit that motivation is equally important in learning. Only those who want to learn and don’t give up will succeed even if they are less talented. Here it is worthwhile learning the theory of Malcolm Gladwell, which asserts that it takes roughly ten thousand hours of practice to achieve mastery in a field.
But back to reality – not everyone is a commando and has unlimited resources of internal motivation. Therefore motivating students and supporting them is a very important element of the learning process. A course instructor is a person who not only is supposed to present grammar rules of a given language or vocabulary but also make students interested in the topic. If the role of a course instructor were limited to a necessary minimum, it would make no sense to run classes and language schools, and recorded classes would be sold on DVDs. We don’t want that, do we?
Isn’t a student in a language school already adequately motivated to learn?
Certainly, a language school is unlike a mandatory elementary school, which everyone has to attend and nobody asks the students whether they want to or not. But assuming that everyone willingly enrolled in the language learning course and spends afternoons or Saturdays is a gross oversimplification. A secondary school student can come to the language classes only because parents told them to; someone else may attend only because the company paid for the course and they have to be present although they don’t really want to.
A language course extends over a longer period – at least a term. Across several months the level of motivation of individual persons is likely to change: someone who started a course to be promoted has learnt during the course that their rival got the position; a student may have caught a cold and feel worse; students may have other problems at school or work. You never know what’s the story behind the people sitting in the classroom, so don’t assume they will be all equally enthusiastic about attendance in the classes.
Why should a course instructor try to enhance the students’ motivation?
First of all, because motivated students will learn more and will use their time at classes better. A success (e.g. passed language certificate) may encourage them to continue learning. And if they feel that behind their success is the course instructor, who transferred knowledge to them well and motivated them to learn on, they will be eager to keep attending such instructor’s classes and courses. Surely everyone would like to be a course instructor the students, and consequently also language school directors, „fight for”?
So how can we motivate students?
Dan Pink claims that motivators can be divided into two major groups: external and internal ones. External motivators comprise the so-called stick and carrot method, e.g. “the best student in the group gets a cinema ticket”, or “if you don’t do the homework, next time I’ll assign twice as much”. According to Dan Pink such simple motivators work well in rewarding simple and repeatable activities, e.g. in a manufacturing plant, where a worker has to e.g. produce weekly a specified number of car parts, for which he is eligible for a bonus. A problem arises when you have to reward activities requiring creativity and search for completely new solutions – a reward, even a very attractive one, is likely not only to fail to work but even to lower effectiveness because people fighting for the reward will focus more on getting it than on attainment of the goal. Language learning is an activity requiring a significant intellectual effort, so definitely much better results should be brought about by internal motivators, i.e. not a promised rewards, but the factors that make students themselves want to learn because for some reasons they consider learning to matter a lot. According to Dan Pink, we should focus on three motivators:
– autonomy, the possibility to control what we do. In the case of language learning, this can be the possibility to choose one out of several presented sets of exercises, or to write a paper on an openly formulated topic, which will let students write what they really want,
– mastery, i.e. becoming better and better in what you do. When learning most people want to see some effects and aim at the moment when they attain mastery and become role models for others. Therefore praise each step that brings them closer to that goal, praise those areas where they have already achieved their small mastery: “Throughout the last term your grammar has improved a lot”, “You have accent that Cambridge students wouldn’t be ashamed of”, “an excellent paper, at the level of German secondary school graduate, who uses this language on daily basis”,
– purpose, i.e. demonstrating that our small activities are part of much bigger purpose. This can be e.g. passing a language certificate (we wrote more about language certificates earlier at the blog – read it).
We recommend the excellent speech by Dan Pink about motivation made during TED conference – substantively relevant and full of humour at the same time (you can turn Polish subtitled on):
Additional tips
Remember: infect your course participants with enthusiasm, help remove demotivators by explaining complex issues; at each step when they do something well – praise them. We know then this entry does not exhaust the issue of motivation. It is a subject of studies performed by researchers and thick books, but we hope that having read this entry you will agree with us that the role of a course instructor in motivating students is huge, and those who can do it well will become excellent teachers.
How do you motivate your students? Share your reflections in the comments.