Motivational Currents in Language Learning

Frameworks for Focused Interventions

Zoltán Dörnyei, Alastair Henry, Christine Muir

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138777323
• eBook ISBN: 9781317679240
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Education General
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Building on Zoltán Dörnyei's authoritative work in the field of learner motivation, this book introduces a new conceptualization—Directed Motivational Currents (DMCs)—and sets out the defining aspects of what they are, what they are not, and how they are related to language learning motivation. Going beyond focused behavior in a single activity, DMCs concern intensive long-term motivation. The distinctive feature of the theory is that it views motivation not simply as a springboard for action but also as a uniquely self-renewing and sustainable process. It is this energizing capacity which distinguishes DMCs from almost every other motivational construct described in the research literature.

Motivational Currents in Language Learning offers new insights, valuable both to motivation researchers and classroom practitioners. The accessible style, along with plentiful illustrations and practical suggestions for promoting sustained learning, invite readers to think about motivation in a different way. Highly relevant for language teachers, teachers-in-training, teacher educators, and researchers in TESOL and applied linguistics, the book explains how the DMC construct can be integrated into course structures and teaching methodologies, and encourages teachers to try out novel methods for harnessing motivational power in classroom settings.

Chapter 1 Introduction

Three Stories

With contributions by Zana Ibrahim

DOI: 10.4324/9781315772714-1

This chapter will:

• introduce the concept of directed motivational currents;
• describe how DMCs differ from Csikszentmihalyi’s notion of the ‘flow experience;’
• illustrate DMCs by presenting the stories of our three focal language learners, each of whom has experienced a strong DMC.

This book is about the intriguing motivational phenomenon of long-term motivational surges. Not only can these surges or currents be observed in all forms of human activity, but, when they do occur, they have a powerful impact. The phenomenon depicts a highly salient state: People who experience such motivational surges understand unequivocally that they are ‘in the zone,’ and others around them also recognize the fact they are caught up in something special, prompting comments to the effect of ‘You can’t talk to Humphrey nowadays, he’s so deeply engrossed in his work/studies/music/etc. that he has eyes/ears for nothing else …’ Curiously, for various reasons which we will explain in the next chapter, this phenomenon has not yet been systematically described in the literature. Given the fact that we believe it can offer a great deal of useful insight into the nature of motivation in general and—of particular importance from the perspective of this book—into ways by which we might better motivate learners to achieve their long-term goals, this seems rather strange.

After several months of searching for an expressive label, we decided to call this phenomenon a ‘directed motivational current,’ not least because of several resilient metaphorical analogies associated with ocean currents, such as the Gulf Stream. Originating in the waters off the Florida coast, the Gulf Stream is one of the strongest currents in our oceans. Typically it is 62 miles wide, anything from 800 to 1200 meters deep, and, at points, is capable of transporting water at a rate of 150 cubic meters per second. It is also said to transport enough heat to satisfy around 100 times the world’s energy demand! In the first paper, which introduced the notion of DMCs—Dörnyei, Muir, and Ibrahim (2014) ¹ —we described the analogy with the Gulf Stream in the following way:

The foremost connection between the Gulf Stream and DMCs concerns the formidable flow of energy which, crucially, the Gulf Stream maintains without at any point requiring any external replenishment. We believe that a similar motivational stream is evident in the various examples of DMCs … if the correct conditions can be engineered to allow these motivational pathways to be created, a motivational jet stream will emerge that is capable of transporting individuals forward, even in situations where any hope of progress had been fading. Once a DMC is in place, through its self-propelling nature learners become caught up in this powerful flow of motivation and are relayed forwards towards achieving their goals.

(p. 11)

How can one recognize a DMC? Although their specific content will naturally vary from domain to domain, DMCs share a common pattern; a person or a group suddenly embarks on a project, invests a great deal of time and energy and, as a result, achieves something quite remarkable. A fully-fledged DMC can become an all-consuming preoccupation around which all other activities in an individual’s life are somehow accommodated. We might see DMCs arising in situations which are typically characterized by low or stagnated levels of motivation, and the initiation of a concrete pathway of motivated action creates a new lease on life. For example, the prospect of a job opportunity in another country might suddenly spark a period of intensive language learning, or an opportunity to raise money for a worthy cause trigger a fiery fund-raising campaign. The outcome of a DMC often surprises even the people who are caught up in the current; it is uniformly the case that individuals would have never thought that they could get so far or achieve so much!

A DMC is an intense motivational drive—or surge—which is capable of stimulating and supporting long-term behavior (such as the learning of an L2).

Characteristics not Representative of DMCs

A DMC is not equivalent to high levels of motivation in general. A DMC is qualitatively different from the ongoing motivation of a good student; instead, it is a relatively short-term, highly intense burst of motivational energy focused towards a clearly defined goal, and, as such, it functions over and on top of the steady motivation which a good student will exhibit throughout the year. Similarly, as we shall see in the next chapter, a DMC is also not the same as the conscious maintaining of motivated behavior through some sort of self-discipline, for example, the exercising of effective self-regulation or the demonstration of resilience and perseverance. Conversely, a DMC has the sense of an almost effortless outpouring of energy and a tangible sense of excitement and anticipation, far greater than that seen in either everyday motivated behavior or in disciplined work ethics. Finally, a DMC is not the same as the ‘flow experience’ as defined by Csikszentmihalyi (1975, 1988). Because this latter concept is arguably the closest parallel to a DMC, it is instructive to further elaborate on the ways that they are linked and, importantly, on how the two concepts differ.

A DMC is not equivalent to high levels of student motivation in general, but instead describes periods of motivation over and above an individual’s ‘normal’ levels.

Motivational Flow Versus DMCs

Originally introduced in the mid-1970s and then popularized more widely in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s (1975, 1988, 1990) concept of ‘flow’ refers to a state of intensive involvement in a task which feels so absorbing that people often compare it to being outside of everyday reality. Flow, in its most developed form, is characterized by focused concentration in and through the enjoyment of an activity in which, as Csikszentmihalyi (2009, p. 394) describes, people lose track of time and other elements of the human experience:

Flow is a subjective state people report when they are completely involved in something to the point of forgetting time, fatigue, and everything else but the activity itself. It is what one feels when reading a good novel, or playing a good game of tennis, or when having a stimulating conversation. The defining feature of flow is intense experiential involvement in moment-to-moment activity, which can be either physical or mental.

Although the archetypical example of someone in a flow state is the artist who gets lost in his/her work, we can also observe the phenomenon in many nonartistic engagements, for example such as among people who play digital games. In fact, as Csikszentmihalyi (2009) reports, surveys show that 85–90% of the population in the US and in Europe claim to have had such an experience in their lives. This would explain why, after it was published in an accessible form (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990), the notion of flow achieved New York Times bestseller status, the underlying claim that “a good life is one that is characterized by complete absorption in what one does” (Nakamura & Csikszentmihalyi, 2002, p. 89) resonating with many, with flow believed to be responsible for this “complete absorption.” This highly positive reception is testament to the fact that most people cherish flow experiences and, having experienced one, long for more. As a consequence of this, besides establishing a permanent place in psychology, the concept of flow has also had a growing impact on popular culture, even on seemingly unrelated domains such as sports, business, and politics.

The element of total absorption characterizing both flow and DMCs would suggest that the two states are related, and to some extent this is certainly true. Flow is the mainstream motivation construct which is most similar to DMCs in that it concerns the all-encompassing personal experience of task engagement. However, while Csikszentmihalyi (1988) explains that flow states are most likely to occur in structured activities such as ritual events, games, sports, and artistic performances, DMCs involve longer periods—often weeks or months—and subsume multiple separate tasks. Interestingly, Csikszentmihalyi also adds that “Occasionally, however, an entire culture, a whole way of life becomes so coherently structured that everything in it provides flow—including work and all the routine, obligatory aspects of everyday life” (p. 31). This sense of “a whole way of life” becoming, in certain circumstances, structured to an extent that “everything in it provides flow,” including all of the mundane aspects of daily existence, is indeed the very essence of DMCs, and the relationship between flow and DMC experiences is further evidenced by the accounts of several respondents in Csikszentmihalyi’s (2009) past interview studies who “used the metaphor of a stream or current that carried them along effortlessly” (p. 396).

A DMC is similar to the flow experience in some aspects (most notably the learners’ absorption in the action) but different in others (most specifically their timescales, the differing sources of positive emotionality, and the structures underpinning them).

Having said this, the actual construct which Csikszentmihalyi focuses on most in his writings under the rubric of ‘flow’ concerns a much shorter time window than a “stream or current.” Indeed, it is almost always restricted to a single activity. The conceptual difference between flow and DMCs is, in this respect, well illustrated by Csikszentmihalyi’s (1988, p. 30) description of the requisite conditions which enable an individual to stay ‘in the zone:’ “To remain in flow, one must increase the complexity of the activity by developing new skills and taking on new challenges.” When this happens, an “inner dynamic of the optimal experience” arises in which an individual actively seeks out challenges that involve higher levels of complexity. It is this process of “spiraling complexity” that, he argues, “forces people to stretch themselves, to always take on another challenge, to improve on their abilities” (p. 30). What Csikszentmihalyi is saying here, in effect, is that the extension of the flow experience happens through the addition of cognitive twists or challenges to the initial activity—not unlike in digital games where the duration of a game can be extended by adding further difficulty levels, stages, locations, or rounds. The prolonged version, however, still remains in essence the same task, albeit with added variations. In this sense the concept of flow is rather different from a DMC, in that in the latter what are often diverse tasks and task components are subsumed by an overarching current, linked together by the ‘directedness’ of the process as the current moves toward an overall goal or vision. (We describe these processes and the functioning of the final goal/vision in detail in Chapter 3).

Thus, while both DMCs and flow involve a ‘peak experience’—that is, a state of heightened awareness and full involvement—the timescale of the two experiences is significantly different. This has major implications for the coherence of the structures underlying them. A flow state is held together by a task’s intrinsically rewarding nature (i.e., the pleasure derived from doing the activity itself), whereas a DMC involves a prolonged process of engagement in a series of tasks which are not necessarily enjoyable in and of themselves—although of course some may be—but are rewarding chiefly because they transport an individual toward a highly valued end. This difference in the source of satisfaction is well illustrated by Csikszentmihalyi’s (1975/2000) recollection of how painters experience flow:

The tasks which make up a DMC pathway will inevitably consist of activities which both would and would not be perceived as enjoyable in their own right; however, regardless of their inherent ‘enjoyability’ in normal circumstances, all tasks along a DMC pathway are perceived as enjoyable because they transport an individual toward a highly valued end-goal.

as I watched and photographed painters at their easels, one of the things that struck me most vividly was the almost trancelike state they entered when the work was going well. Once the painting started to take shape, the artist became completely enthralled. The motivation to go on painting was so intense that fatigue, hunger, or discomfort ceased to matter. Why were these people so taken with what they were doing? The answers that the main motivational theories could give were not persuasive. For example, the reigning behaviorist explanation suggested that artists are so motivated to paint because they want a reward—the finished painting—and it is this goal that motivates their behavior. But I noticed that the artists I was observing almost immediately lost interest in the canvas they had just painted. Typically they turned the finished canvas around and stacked it against a wall. Nor were they particularly eager to show it off, or very hopeful about selling it. They could hardly wait to start on a new one.

(p. xiv)

This archetypical description of the flow experience depicts the participant’s behavior as fully autotelic, that is, as having an end or purpose in itself rather than pointing toward a larger goal. This “autotelic experience” is at the very heart of the notion of flow, and in fact, this was the original term Csikszentmihalyi and his lab team originally introduced to describe the phenomenon they were studying (1975/2000, p. xviii). In contrast to this, within a DMC everything is centered on approaching a desired long-term target or vision. As we have mentioned, the current may include several constituent tasks or stages which are not perceived as pleasurable in themselves—which is contrary to the flow principle—and significantly, as we will discuss in Chapter 6, in a DMC even these tedious and mechanical steps along the way, such as working with foreign language grammar, are perceived and experienced in a positive emotional light. This is because enjoyment is projected onto them from the overall emotional loading of the target goal. It is as if, in a fractal manner, each step along the way reproduces some of the joy linked to the overall journey, regardless of the inherent ‘enjoyability’ (or otherwise) of any particular activity if viewed in isolation.

The Stories of Three Language Learners

Having introduced DMCs in a somewhat abstract form and examined what they are not, let us now look a little more closely at what they are. To do so, we would like to present three second language (L2) learning stories from our collected corpus of interview data, all three ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Three Stories
• 2 DMCs Versus Long-Term Motivation
• 3 Vision: The ‘Directed’ Aspect of DMCs
• 4 The Launch of a DMC: Shifting Into ‘Hyperdrive’
• 5 The Unique Structure of a DMC: Utilizing ‘Renewable Energy’
• 6 Positive Emotional Loading: Eudaimonic Well-Being and Authenticity
• 7 When the Current Begins to Wane: The Nature of Effort and the Longer-Term Sustainability of DMCs
• 8 Introducing ‘Group-DMCs’
• 9 Generating DMCs in the Language Classroom
• Index