Parrot Time Magazine

The Thinking of Speaking
Issue #19 January / February 2016
Extras
Motivation

Motivation

Expressing oneself and the expression of oneself in language learning

Expressing oneself and the expression of oneself in language learning

by Olivier Elzingre
January / February 2016 |  asd

A quick exercise

Before I get into the topic, if you are currently learning a language, I would like to invite you to study the next two graphs. I suggest you draw them on a sheet (no need to be too precise!).


Graph 1. Year Trajectory

Look at the one entitled "Year trajectory" and think back over the last year how motivated you were to learn your second language. When have you felt periods of high or low motivation? What was going on in your life? Children, marriage, divorce, parents passing away, promotion at work, winning the lottery?

The other graph, entitled 2 hour trajectory, is for next time you settle to do some language learning: track the level of your motivation from 1 to 10 every ten minutes. When you finished your hour or two of learning, look at the line. How linear is it?


Graph 2. 2 hour trajectory

It may be possible that over the last year you saw yourself as a very motivated learner, but in the completion of exercises your motivational trajectory was U shaped, downwards, or up and down. If you are a teacher, you may be familiar with sociocultural theory, and particularly the relationship between goals and actions and between motives and activity. Without going into too much detail, the first graph would be a representation of how your motives inspired your language learning, whereas the second graph shows how your immediate goals (becoming more familiar with a specific grammar question) inspires your action (completion of a single exercise). Within this sociocultural theory, motivation is found when goals and motives align themselves for the achievement of actions and activity.

The purpose of this exercise is to show you the extreme variability of motivation both at macro an microlevels. Now imagine you are in a class of 20 learners, and now you can begin to imagine how many different motivational trajectories exist within that single microcosm, and that those motivational levels are not disconnected or discreet entities but form a very large motivational continuum from the shortest of actions to the entire length of your life.

This article is divided into three sections: the first is a summary of motivational research, so that you can understand where it all started and where we are now. I will not go into every theory proposed, will only focus on the most important concepts. The second section will highlight some essential truth about our learning process. While not directly related to motivation, this section explains how we learn in a non-linear fashion, and that periods of regression are normal. Oddly, regression can even be seen as a positive sign! Finally, I will make a few suggestions to harness your or your student's motivation. Overall, I hope to give you some insights into the connections between who you are as a person and your drive to learn, and what you can expect in your journey.

Introduction


Trying to establish a model for motivation is very difficult

It makes intuitive sense that motivation is an important factor in the success of any language learning venture. Yet motivation in second language learning, an extensively researched concept, remains difficult to define. Robert Gardner, arguably the most celebrated author in motivation literature, and one of two authors who introduced motivation as a focus for systematic research, admitted that it was not really possible to give an accurate definition of the term. Instead, he offered a description of motivation as a process. He stated that motivation was "the extent to which the individual works or strives to learn the language because of a desire to do so and the satisfaction experienced in this activity. Effort alone does not signify motivation... When the desire to achieve the goal and favourable attitudes toward the goal are linked with the effort or the drive, then we have a motivated organism" (R. C. Gardner, 1985, pp.10-11, fig.1).

One of the most motivating things about learning a language is getting to the point where you can have a conversation with a native speaker, during which they do not need to slow down or adapt their language.

According to Gardner, motivational orientations could be seen as fitting on a continuum. At one end stood integrativeness, where learners were interested in learning a language in order to identify with the community of those speakers. At the other end was instrumentality, an orientation that motivated language learning for professional benefits or financial gains. Integrativeness is still impacting research more than 50 years after the concept was proposed. In Gardner's view, this was the orientation that led to a more likely successful outcome.

Gardner's model did come under heavy criticism, not least because the population he was studying benefitted from particular circumstances which are not repeated in many other places. Indeed, he focused on the learning patterns of English speaking Canadians, who were acquiring French. Their easy access to native speakers and the relative harmonious cohabitation between the two ethnic groups made the conditions particularly propitious for integrative orientations to develop. Scholars highlighted that the learning context played a major part in how a learner related to the object of learning.

Dimensions of complexity were added to Gardner's integration-instrumental continuum: time frames, feared outcomes, learner identity and cultural contexts were gradually conceptualised within the theory.


Using a language in a real world situation is a great motivator for learners

For many academics, including myself, motivation is nowadays seen as an expression of identity. This is because the motivational process is understood as the dynamic interaction of a person's possible selves (their idea of who they could become) and their learning experience. The implication is that for learners to really engage with the language, they need to imagine themselves speak it, be part of a community of speakers, use the language in a way consistent with their personal, social and professional aspirations.

The key question, the challenge for teachers is what can be done to get students to see how the language they are learning is relevant to their lives and how they may imagine themselves evolve in a real language context, as opposed to the classroom bubble. Here are three things I believe teachers and students would benefit from keeping in mind: how we learn, what makes the learner identify with the language and how imagination can help you.

Section I: The learning trajectory

Because what we are talking about here is motivation to engage in learning a language, it pays to have a look at how we learn. So, this is how we don't learn.


Graph 3. Linear learning progress

If you have children, think about pretty much any development your little ‘un had to go through. I am sure you will remember toilet training, the stage my son is at currently. It's going great for a few days or a week or two, then one day it's like they have never been acquainted with a potty. The trajectory of learning a language is remarkably similar to that of potty training, possibly with as many tears.

What is difficult to accept for a learner (and for teachers) is that the learning experience includes progression as well as regressions in all areas. Learning trajectories have a terrible tendency to be not only unpredictable but also co-dependant. For example, you will all have noticed that if you want to be more accurate in your second language (or in your first!), you are often less fluent, more hesitant. It's also been shown that grammatical complexity increases until the learner becomes fluent enough to express subtle meaning variations without having to rely on longer sentences! Here is for example a learner's development of complexity and accuracy. This graph shows the written accuracy and complexity development.


Graph 4. Foreign academic complexity and accuracy development (Rosmawati, 2014)

Notice how accuracy has a tendency to drop when complexity increases, until the latter development stages. This is an indication that the student has acquired the complexity to the point that they do not need to compromise on their accuracy.

If you are ready to accept both progressions and regressions, you are hopefully less likely to feel discouraged during your learning journey. When you notice regressions, despite your continued efforts, take them as a positive sign of your development! Because this means that there are other areas in which you are making crucial progress.

Section II a few tips:

If motivation is an integral part of your identity, here are three things which can help motivating students. First, it follows logically that teaching someone how to express who they are in the target language feeds their desire to improve their skills. Secondly, there has to be space in the classroom for the students to express themselves. The instruction cannot be teacher centred, otherwise, how is the student ever to negotiate their own position?

Standard language, yes, but real language too!!

One of the most motivating things about learning a language is getting to the point where you can have a conversation with a native speaker, during which they do not need to slow down or adapt their language. If a native speaker engages with you in that manner, they see you as competent, as a "linguistic peer", they recognise that you are part of their language community. You may have an accent that identifies you as a foreigner, but remember that languages transcend political and geographical boarders – just consider that there are many more non-native English speakers on the planet than native speakers, many of whom are considered to have mastered English language like few native speakers have (Kissinger is a famous example).

By and large, the language used in authentic conversation is fairly different to the language you are taught in formal classes. If you have spent years in language classes before travelling to the countries where the language is spoken, you might have been shocked at the differences between your perception of that language and the actual language spoken by native speakers. Here's a couple of examples for the French learners:

The word il (he) is more commonly pronounced /i/, by about 10 to 1. That's a small one, but it could easily throw you off in the course of a group conversation or in case of an expression you learn in the first few weeks of learning: il y a (there is). What are the chances that you will understand this expression when in non-careful spoken language, many will pronounce it ya?

A second one is the negative. Here are three versions of "it's not raining" in French:

• Il ne pleut pas
• Il pleut pas
• Il ne pleut


What is the proper way to say "It's not raining" in French?

Remember working on the inclusion of ne before the verb and pas after it? Il ne pleut pas changes to ipleupa in non-careful speech. If you were lucky enough to have noticed that ne deletion, and you are now advanced in your communicative competence, you may read 19th century novels, in which, lo and behold, the pas is frequently deleted! Il ne pleut.

Ok, so these are to some extent just technical issues that one can learn. So here's the biggie.

You learn that using vous is polite and tu is informal. THEN you travel to France, and you realise that it is in fact much more complex, that the French expect a certain "je ne sais pas", so that your interlocutor can redirect the register, thus establishing a friendship between the speakers. It looks like this:

• Oh bonjour, comment allez-vous? (Oh hello, how are you?)

• Ça va, ça va ; on peut se tutoyer, quand même, non? (Ok, ok; we can say "tu" to each other, can't we?)

So here on, you may say tu to your interlocutor. However, at which point can you start doing the famous French bise (the kiss). If you get friendly enough for the bise, the conundrum is not yet over. How many. In my little Swiss village, it's three. In many Southern French regions, it two, around Paris, four, but not in Paris itself. Give the wrong number and you may be surprised to find that you have offended your new friend!

These difficulties can be daunting, or can be considered a challenge by the learner. The aim is not that the classroom provides knowledge of all the communicative subtleties. But no knowledge in those has the double disadvantage of not providing students with the ability to express themselves across different registers, and being unprepared for an eventual trip to the country of the target language.

Knowing the standard variation of a language is useful, there's no doubt. As non-native, you might be fluent enough to have a conversation with anyone. Standard language is also useful for teachers, as it provides them with material common to all learners and thus an assessment benchmark. However, there is a real issue of self-representation when learners do not know how to navigate registers. Bilingual people often talk of being a different person when they speak a different language. This is because most are not as comfortable in each language they speak and are therefore unable to represent themselves in the same way. There are other issues, of course, including how languages express similar ideas in very different ways, are culturally biased and so forth. Still, expressing oneself in the standard language alone seriously limits self-representation.

Thus if motivation is closely related to the expression of oneself, a better-rounded presentation of oneself can only help.

Chalk and Talk/be quiet and listen/open your book etc

At least some of what is taking place in classrooms is still based on the old fashion chalk and talk. I am guilty of this too. However much I try to encourage my students to take some ownership in their learning, it's still far too easy to ask students to copy a vocabulary list or to write down grammar examples, followed by a cloze test. When either my students or I are tired, it's a solution that limits disruptive behaviour. Because it's clear that people learn better when we suppress who they are.

I'm exaggerating a bit here. High school education in Australia is not as strict and inflexible as I suggest, but there certainly are elements of it.


Teaching a language needs to be more interactive, not with a single teacher talking while no students talk

A common mistake made by teachers is to request complete silence in their classes. Sure, it looks great from the outside, a group of students listening intently while a teacher is dispensing their wisdom. However, if students are not being allowed to have an active role in their own learning, they will not be able to make connections with the target language.

It looks like I'm blaming teachers here, but students are just as guilty! The majority of the time students are too anxious to speak up, even when the instructional model is student centred. Think about this expression "student centred" for a second. What pressure on a language novice! Of course, no teacher in their right mind would simply pass the instruction responsibility entirely to their students. But those moments when the spotlight is on the learner really has the potential to freak them out.

The point is that the teacher and the students have to negotiate, and break the two sided school bench paradigm: it's not the students on one side and the teacher on the other. If that was the case, how insulting for students to be all put in the same basket! One identity for all!

Language learning is a courageous endeavour for everyone. The learners all need to speak up through their anxiety and the teachers all need to relinquish some control. I would love to be able to say more about how this negotiated classroom looks, but in truth, I believe that the negotiation permeates through the entire year or years of formal classes. I realise that I am positioning myself as an enemy of pedagogy, but I truly believe that the key to a successful class environment is the constant and every day scrutiny of my relationship with each of my students, accepting that I will not cater for everyone's comfort, and nor should I.

Section III: A vivid Imagination

Imagination comes up frequently in motivational research. Students who imagine themselves speaking their target language are more likely to succeed in their endeavour. I am not talking here about imagining yourself in a parallel world, but rather projecting yourself in that existing community of speakers to which you don't yet belong. How does it look and feel? Do you imagine yourself making light chit chat at the till in small town Saudi Arabia, presenting to a group of potential investors in Kenya, or striking a conversation with a complete stranger on your 3.14 train to Vladivostok? Whatever rocks your boat, keep those images preciously and replay them in your head. When you are eventually in those situations, what feeling of accomplishment!

If you teach language, and even if you don't, you may well have heard of the almost mechanical ZPD, the zone of proximal development. When I was a teenager I read Stephen King a lot, and subsequently ZPD always reminded me of Dead Zone – great book and loved the movie (who doesn't love Christopher Walken??). Anyway, that's for a different column.

ZPD is the identification of the gap between the level a student is at and the reasonably challenging goal they need to reach. For decades teachers like me, in their sense of self-importance, thought that they were the judge of the gap to bridge. However, if you allow your students to become more active in their learning, they will also identify a gap. The teacher doesn't need to pretend to know everything about their students' cognitive system, and the student is potentially much happier to have been able to set their own goals. In fact, one of the major theoretical contribution to the sociocultural tradition from which ZPD originated is Self-Determination Theory. That's right, the theory that tells us how unbelievable effective it is to let students become their own learning agent.

So how will the student identify the gap to their learning goals? It's a little like the 17th century Descartes's argument in that God exists: how can I know what perfection is if I am not perfect? It must have been infused in me by some perfect being. Thus God must exist. Despite my own lack of belief, I can see the nice, nice and nice logic in the argument. But Descartes was all logic and no imagination! The student can see with incredible clarity what they don't yet know.

Conclusion


Motivation remains as slippery a concept as ever. Like so many other socio-cognitive processes, we know what motivation is, but we would be hard press to define it. However, it seems that we are now in a better position to accept its slipperiness. In fact, it serves us well not to define it too sharply, because a little bit of vagueness means that we can be more flexible when thinking about it.

Many factors play in your success to learn a foreign language. Motivation is just one of them. Another factor is your learning ability. But when you talk to people about their success or otherwise in learning languages, they often highlight one factor above all else. That's because it often feels that way. But take a minute and reflect about everything that has helped or hindered your learning pathway.

Over the past couple of decades, a realisation dawned over those who research acquisition of second language. The learning process is not cumulative, it's developmental. You don't get to know a new language because you learnt it formally. You know it because you learned, experienced, made mistakes, plateaued, regressed, improved, got sick of it, talked to others, cried, screamed, loved. It's in the midst of those changes that you find motivation.

Olivier Elzingre is a PhD candidate researching motivation and identity development in study abroad contexts. He teaches high school French in Australia. Correspondence to olivierrelzingre@gmail.com


Parrot Time is always looking for guest writers, so if you are interested in writing for us or donating something you have written for your own blog, please contact us at editor@parrottime.com. We look forward to your contributions!

Motivation: Expressing oneself and the expression of oneself in language learning
Writer: Olivier Elzingre
Images:
Janet Burgess: Talking people
Petey: Female climber (title); Woman drawing chart; Couple walking in rain; Classroom; Mountain climber
Sources:
• Gardner, R. C. (1985). "Social psychology and second language learning: the role of attitudes and motivation." London; Baltimore: EArnold.
• Rosmawati. (2014). "Dynamic development of complexity and accuracy: A case study in second language academic writing." Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 37(2), 75–100.

All images are Copyright - CC BY-SA (Creative Commons Share Alike) by their respective owners, except for Petey, which is Public Domain (PD) or unless otherwise noted.

Searching for language resources?
Scriveremo Publishing, has lots of fun books and resource to help you learn a language. Click the link below to see our selection of books, availlable for over 30 langauges!
Parleremo Languages Word Search Puzzles Travel Edition Italian - Volume 1



Also in this issue




Others like this

Comments

comments powered by Disqus