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jor mission in life. Also, we waste quite a bit of our life doing things that are unimportant and not urgent, such as reading trash novels, watching mindless TV, etc. So assuming we do what we are motivated to do, then our motivations are frequently misguided. Covey also emphasizes that our efficiency could be greatly in creased if we spent more time doing things that are of ten not seen as urgent but truly are important, e.g. clarifying the major purpose of our life, developing re lationships that facilitate efficiency, growth, and meaningfulness, planning and preparing for important upcoming tasks, reading, exercising, resting, etc. He tells a story about a traveller who comes upon a hard working person sawing down a tree and asks, “How long have you been sawing on this tree?” The tired, sweaty worker said, “A long time seems like hours.” So, the traveller asked, “Why don’t you sharpen your saw?” The reply was “I am too busy sawing!” A lot of us are sawing with a saw that needs to be sharpened. We need to know a lot about the processes of motivation and self direction.

No road to success is completely smooth and free of obstacles. It depends on your attitude. Choosing to be positive is choosing to be successful and vice versa.

Interest is an important motivator for a person. So is a desire to learn and to work. When you link these two things together, you create success. Often success in an endeavour leads to more interest and a greater desire to learn and work, creating an upward spiral of motivation toward a goal you have established.

When you truly believe in yourself, there is little that you cannot accomplish. A confident mind finds a way around every obstacle, or it simply runs through it. Each problem becomes an opportunity, and each minute that you are awake is fertile ground for new ideas, thoughts and angles to approach the challenge. So belief is one of the keys to motivation.

The greatest plan in the world will not bring you re sults unless you work. Hard work is the last and most important element of the process of motivation. You have to take what you have learned and what you have decided is your goal and achieve it. Few things that are worthwhile come easy. If you are dedicated to hard work you will win in the end.

We live in an achievement oriented world with standards that tell people success is important. The standards suggest that success requires a competitive spirit, a desire to win, a motivation to do well, and the wherewithal to cope with adversity and persist until an objective is reached.

Some individuals are highly motivated to succeed and expend a lot of effort striving to excel. Other indi viduals are not as motivated to succeed and don’t work as hard to achieve. These two types of individuals vary in their achievement motivation (or need for achieve ment), the desire to accomplish something, to reach a standard of excellence, and to expend effort to excel.

A host of studies have correlated achievement related responses with different aspects of the indivi dual’s experiences and behaviour. The findings are di verse, but they do suggest that achievement oriented individuals have a stronger hope for success than a fear of failure, are moderate rather than high or low risk takers, and persist for appropriate lengths of time in solving difficult problems.

Our achievement motivation – whether in school, at work, or in sports – can be divided into two main types: intrinsic motivation, the internal desire to be competent and to do something for its own sake; and extrinsic motivation, which is influenced by external rewards and punishments.

You work hard in college because a personal stan dard of excellence is important to you, intrinsic moti vation is involved. But if you work hard in college be cause you know it will bring you a higher paying job when you graduate, extrinsic motivataion is at work.

Intrinsic motivation implies that internal motiva tion should be promoted and external factors deempha sized. In this way individuals learn to attribute to themselves the cause of their success and failure, and especially how much effort they expend. But in reality, achievement is motivated by both internal and external factors; persons are never divorced from their external environment. Some of the most achievement oriented individuals are those who have a high personal stan dard for achievement and are also highly competitive.

Extrinsic motivation is that which derives from the influence of some kind of external incentive, as distinct from the wish to learn or work for its own sake or interest in tasks.

There are many sources of extrinsic motivation. Here are some of them: success and its rewards, fai lure, authoritative demands, control and competition.

Success is perhaps the single most important fea ture in raising extrinsic motivation. People who have succeeded in past tasks will be more willing to engage with the next one, more confident in their chances of succeeding, and more likely to persevere in their ef forts. But a sense of pride and satisfaction may of course be enhanced by explicit praise or approval, or by some rewards. Four types of reward (positive rein forcements) have been identified. These are listed be low in the order in which they are most often used:

social rewards (social contact and pleasant in teractions with other people, including praise, a smile to recognise an action or achievement or to say thank you, encouraging remarks or a gesture of approval;

token rewards (house points, grades, certifi cates);

material rewards (tangible, usable or edible items);

activity rewards (opportunities for enjoyable activities)

Failure in some sense is generally regarded as something to be avoided, just as success is something to be sought. But this should not be taken too far. For one thing, success loses its sweetness if it is too easily attained and if there is no real possibility or experience of failure. For another, it is inevitable that there will be occasional failures in any normal learning or work ing experience, and they are nothing to be ashamed of; most people recognize this, take setbacks in their stride, and look for ways to exploit them in order to succeed next time.

People are often motivated by pressure, recogniz ing the authority and the right of some persons to make their demands, and trusting their judgements.

Authoritative demands can be over used or mis used: if people only do things because they are obeying commands, without any awareness of objectives and results or involvement in decisions, they are unlikely to develop personal responsibility for their own perfor mance or long term motivation to continue. On the other hand, an over emphasis on freedom and autono my and corresponding lack of authoritative demand can lead to noticeable lowering of effort and achieve ment, and often, paradoxically, to dissatisfaction.

The motivating power of control appears clear. This is a useful incentive, provided there is not too much stress attached, and provided it is not used too often.

People will often be motivated to give of their best not for the sake of the process itself but in order to beat their opponents in a competition.

Individual competition can be stressful for people who find losing humiliating, or are not very good at the subject and therefore likely consistently to lose in contests based on knowledge; and if overused, it even tually affects negatively their willingness to cooperate and help each other. If, however, the competition is taken not too seriously, and if scores are at least partly

a result of chance, so that anyone might win, positive motivational aspects are enhanced and stress lowered.

You can have everything you want in life if only you are willing or eager to invest effort in your activi ties to progress. So, even if you have intelligence, knowledge base, study skills and even great diligence but you are not motivated, you won’t get far.

S. Capel, Leask, T. Turner. Learning to teach in the secondary school. London, 1995, pp. 94–105

COMPREHENSION CHECK

Exercise 1. Say whether these statements are true (T) or false (F), and if they are false, say why.

T F 10. If you work hard in college because you know it will bring you a higher paying job when you graduate, intrinsic moti vation is at work.

T F 11. If individual competition is overused, it eventually affects positively learners’ willingness to cooperate and help each other.

Exercise 2. Read the text again, divide it into logical parts, and give names to each of them.

Exercise 3. Make up questions to the following an swers.

1.

Motivation is trying to reach our goals.

2.

A goal is merely a focused view where you want to head.

3.

when we feel capable, responsible, self directed, respected and hopeful.

4.

“mastery goals” when people want to improve their skills and “performance goals” when a per son wants to beat others.

5.

to make motivation more effective.

6.

because it is imposible to succeed without belief and hard work.

7.

intrinsic and extrinsic.

8.

Intrinsic motivation implies that the internal desire is to be competent and an individual should do something for its own sake.

9.

by external rewards and punishments.

10.

They are: success and its rewards, failure, au thoritative demands, competitions and so on.

LANGUAGE FOCUS

Exercise 1. Match the English word combinations in the left hand column with the Russian equivalents in the right hand column.

B.Put a suitable word from the box above into each gap.

1.Drive factors can _____ the motivational effect of incentives.

2.Intrinsic motivation is in its turn associated with what has been termed “cognitive drive” – _____ to learn for its own sake.

3.The needs of visually impaired and physically dis abled pupils pose a variety of _____ for subject teachers.

4.The teacher can do a great deal to _____ the memory, organization and sequencing skills of such a child.

5.Useful methods for the identification of excep tionally able students include monitoring of _____

in assessment situations.

6.You need to observe students very carefully in or der to spot small changes or _____.

7.Research findings show that students are _____ to respond more positively to praise and positive com ments about their work or behaviour than to criti cism and negative comments.

8.Extrinsic rewards should be used with caution for they have the potential for _____ existing intrin sic motivation.

9.The needs for food, water, air, sleep and even sex are always there, but they don’t _____ our lives.

Exercise 4. Arrange the following words in pairs of

(a)synonyms and (b) antonyms:

a)to achieve, adversity, aim, apt, to concentrate, to en deavour, to engender, to enhance, to excel, to focus, to give rise to, a goal, harm, inclined, to increase, misfortune, to reach, to surpass, to try, hurt;

b)to do harm, to suppress, intrinsic, credible, to im prove, to complicate, to enhance, incompetence, to facilitate, to diminish, competence, to be of bene fit, to worsen, extrinsic, incredible, to spur.

Exercise 5.

A.Put the words from the following list un der the following headings connected with motivation:

–types of motivation

–types of goals

–sources of extrinsic motivation

challenging, extrinsic, easy to reach, failure, com petition, frustrating, rewards, realistic, success, authoritative demands, achievable, demeaning, in trinsic, long range, short term

B.Complete these sentences using one of the words from the box above in each space.

1._____ but _____ goals are themselves motivating.

2.You work hard in college because a personal stan dard of excellence is important to you, _____ moti vation is involved.

3._____ goals are boring or _____.

4.Since challenging but _____ goals require us to stretch and grow, they must constantly be changed to match the conditions and our ability.

5._____is perhaps the most important feature in raising _____ motivation.