Teaching and Researching: Motivation

Zoltán Dörnyei, Ema Ushioda

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138835559
• eBook ISBN: 9781317862819
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Cultivating motivation is crucial to a language learner's success - and therefore crucial for the language teacher and researcher to understand. This fully revised edition of a groundbreaking work reflects the dramatic changes the field of motivation research has undergone in recent years, including the impact of language globalisation and various dynamic and relational research methodologies, and offers ways in which this research can be put to practical use in the classroom and in research.

Key new features and material:

· A brand new chapter on current socio-dynamic and complex systems perspectives

· New approaches to motivating students based on the L2 Motivational Self System

· Illustrative summaries of qualitative and mixed methods studies

· Samples of new self-related motivation measures

Providing a clear and comprehensive theory-driven account of motivation, Teaching and Researching Motivation examines how theoretical insights can be used in everyday teaching practice, and offers practical tips. The final section provides a range of useful resources, including relevant websites, key reference works and tried and tested example questionnaires. Written in an accessible style and illustrated with concrete examples, it is an invaluable resource for teachers and researchers alike.

Section
II	Motivation and language teaching

Chapter 5

Motivation in practice: strategies and approaches

This chapter will…

• summarise the main areas where the conscious enhancement of student motivation is a realistic option and outline the strategic arsenal available for language teachers;

• discuss the importance of developing students' motivation from within and promoting motivational self-regulation;

• present a new approach to motivating language learners based on the development of future self-guides.

In Section II, we turn our attention to the interaction between motivation research and classroom practice and examine (a) how the findings of motivation research may benefit language teachers in their dayto-day classroom practice, and (b) what directions for research the analysis of classroom practice may raise. In this chapter we will begin by considering the extent to which theoretical and research insights can lead to practical recommendations for motivating students in the language classroom and, by extension, beyond the classroom as students engage in various forms of independent learning. We will then discuss the nature and scope of motivational strategies available to teachers. The purpose of motivational strategies is to consciously generate and enhance student motivation, as well as maintain ongoing motivated behaviour and protect it from distracting and/or competing action tendencies. An interesting question is to what extent the business of motivating students is regarded as an integral dimension of effective teaching practice, alongside various other procedural skills in classroom instruction and management, or to what extent motivational teaching practice constitutes a distinctive approach to teaching. A separate but related issue is how teachers can negotiate the delicate balance between promoting or socialising student motivation on the one hand (i.e. fostering healthy forms of internalised motivation), and controlling or regulating it on the other (i.e. creating teacherdependent patterns of learner behaviour and compliance). In the final part of this chapter, we will examine how Dörnyei's (2005, 2009a) L2 Motivational Self System opens up interesting new strategic approaches that focus on helping students to develop and sustain visions of their ideal language selves.

5.1 From theory and research to classroom practice

Although no one would doubt that an increasing understanding of student motivation can have significant practical implications, it is questionable whether motivation research in general has reached a level of sophistication that would allow scholars to translate research results into straightforward educational recommendations. The crux of the problem is that while there are many effective motivational principles and guidelines that can help practitioners, these principles do not add up to a coherent theory. Moreover, as we have noted in Section I, there is growing recognition across mainstream motivational psychology and the L2 motivation field that processes of motivation cannot be divorced from complex socio-contextual factors. In practical terms, this means that any pedagogical recommendations deriving from empirical research are not directly generalisable to all classroom situations and, as with other aspects of instructional methodology, need to be adapted in ways that are appropriate to the local learning context (Holliday, 1994).

By context, we mean not simply the broad sociocultural context (e.g. English language education in Japan or Argentina), but also the unique micro-culture, history and social dynamics of a particular classroom, or of other kinds of learning context such as self-access centres, virtual classrooms, distance learning or other independent learning settings.

How often have we heard teachers say, for example, that pedagogical strategies that seem to work well with one group of learners they teach prove ineffective with another? For these reasons, the most educational researchers can do at present is to raise teachers' ‘motivational awareness’ by providing them with a menu of potentially useful insights and suggestions from which they can select according to their actual priorities and concerns, and the characteristics and composition of their students. Surprisingly, however, it is only really within the last 10 to 15 years that this kind of explicit concern with praxis has become established in the motivation literature in language learning as well as the broader field of educational psychology.

In a review of studies examining beginning teachers' perceptions of problems they face, Veenman (1984) found that teachers ranked problems about motivating pupils as the second most serious source of difficulty (the first being 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 effective use of textbooks and curriculum guides. The question of how student motivation can be increased remains a prevailing issue for seasoned practitioners as well, since student lethargy and non-achievement norms (or ‘norms of mediocrity’) in the classroom are regularly reported to be basic hindrances to effective teaching (Daniels, 1994). In the light of this, it is hard to believe that until the mid-1990s there had been no serious attempts in the L2 literature to design motivational strategies for classroom application. With the shift from social psychological to more cognitive-situated perspectives in the 1990s, the increased focus on classroom motivation led to a number of publications on motivational techniques (e.g. Alison and Halliwell, 2002; Brown, 1994; Chambers, 1999; Cranmer, 1996; Dörnyei, 1994a; Dörnyei and Csizér, 1998; Oxford and Shearin, 1994; Williams and Burden, 1997), with Dörnyei's (2001b) Motivational Strategies in the Language Classroom being the most comprehensive summary (for two forthcoming relevant works, see Dörnyei and Kubanyiova, in preparation; Hadfield and Dörnyei, in preparation). However, the amount of research devoted to the question of motivating learners remains rather meagre relative to the total amount of research on L2 motivation, with just a few studies appearing in recent years (e.g. Bernaus and Gardner, 2008; Cheng and Dörnyei, 2007; Guilloteaux and Dörnyei, 2008; Jones et al., 2009).

If we look at general motivational psychology, the same tendency can be noted: far more research has been done in the past to identify various motives and validate motivational theories than to develop techniques to increase motivation. There have, however, been some valuable exceptions to this generalisation: examples of works that we have found useful include Anderman and Anderman (2010), Brophy (2004), Gilbert (2002), Ginsberg and Wlodkowski (2000), Good and Brophy (2007), Jones and Jones (2009), McCombs and Miller (2007), Raffini (1993, 1996) and Schunk et al. (2007).

There is one common feature of most motivational approaches both in the L2 field and in educational psychology: they are based on the idealistic belief that ‘all students are motivated to learn under the right conditions, and that you can provide these conditions in your classroom’ (McCombs and Pope, 1994: vii). This assumption is, at best, arguable and, at worst, naïve. Realistically, it is highly unlikely that everybody can be motivated to learn anything. Yet, our belief is that most students' motivation can be ‘worked on’ and increased. Although rewards and punishments are too often the only tools present in the motivational arsenal of many teachers, the spectrum of other potentially more effective motivational strategies is so broad that it is hard to imagine that none of them would work. The following discussion of motivational strategies is intended to demonstrate the variety of different ways by which motivated learning behaviour can be promoted, with particular reference to the L2 learning context.

Quote 5.1 Brophy's down-to-earth perspective on student motivation

Flow experiences and other manifestations of intrinsic motivation are usually considered ideal and thus held up to teachers as goals to achieve with their students. I agree that these motivational states should be developed in the classroom when it is feasible to do so. However, the goal of achieving sustained intrinsic motivation is not realistic as a basis for planning your all-day, everyday motivational strategies, because classroom learning requires students to try to master a largely imposed curriculum while often being observed by peers and evaluated by teachers.

It is realistic, however, to expect (and help) your students to experience classroom activities as meaningful and worthwhile, and to try to get the intended learning benefits from them. You can encourage this by stimulating students to engage in classroom activities with motivation to learn, which they can do whether or not they find the activities intrinsically enjoyable. Developing your students' motivation to learn involves socializing it as a general disposition as well as stimulating it situationally in the process of implementing lessons and learning activities.

Brophy (2004: 23)

5.2 A framework for motivational strategies

The central question in designing a practical framework of motivational strategies is to decide how to organise the long list of relevant motivational techniques into separate ‘themes’. In the following, we first present a framework developed by Dörnyei (2001b; see Figure 5.1), which was based on the process-oriented model by Dörnyei and Ottó (1998) (Section 3.3.3). This model offers an important advantage over other potential organising principles, namely comprehensiveness. Following through the motivational process from the initial arousal of the motivation to the completion and evaluation of the motivated action seems more reasonable than making somewhat arbitrary decisions about selecting certain central themes and building the material around them. The key units in this process-oriented organisation include:

• Creating the basic motivational conditions, which involves setting the scene for the effective use of motivational strategies.

• Generating student motivation, corresponding roughly to the preactional phase in the model.

• Maintaining and protecting motivation, corresponding to the actional phase.

• Encouraging positive self-evaluation, corresponding to the postactional phase.

After discussing these four motivational dimensions in some detail (each in a se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General Editors' Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction to the Second Edition
• Section I: What is motivation?
• Section II: Motivation and language teaching
• Section III: Researching motivation
• Section IV: Resources and further information
• References
• Author index
• Subject index