Tip #6: Vary the Pace.

Alternate calm games with lively ones to keep the children alert and motivated, but without letting the class get out of hand. Good discipline is essential to effective learning.

Motivation is, without question, the most complex and challenging issue facing teachers today.

Without doubt it would be wrong to oversimply the exact nature of motivation. But, I will take the liberty of simplifying and focussing particularly on selected aspects of motivation. I will attempt to be clear and concise, knowing that others have gone into many of these ideas in much greater depth and word-length. You have the choice to follow up for homework by diving into the bibliography, if you should so wish.

What is motivation?

While many still argue about the very nature of this vital ingredient in the learning recipe, let’s do what I advise my students to often do for some clarity, let’s refer to the dictionary, which tells us that there are, two facets to this:

To motivate:

= to stimulate the interest of someone

= to cause someone to want to do something

Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary

As language teachers we can immediately see how this is crucial in our classrooms. Once we have the attention and interest of our students and they are willing to do the activities we put before them we are well on the way to doing our job as a teacher i.e. getting them to learn something.

Mummy, why is the sky blue?

But why do they need to be motivated? Look at any toddler. The behaviour that characterises young children is that they are constantly learning, asking questions (any parent of young children will attest to this constant, even somewhat irritating, questioning), they are free from inhibitions and enjoy discovering and improving. This is true for language development as well as learning about the world around them. John Holt describes this ‘natural learning style’ thus:

The child is curious. He wants to make sense out of things, find out how things work, gain competence and control over himself and his environment… He is open and receptive. He is experimental.. He is bold. He is not afraid of making mistakes. And he is patient. He can tolerate an extraordinary amount of uncertainty, confusion, ignorance and suspense.. He is willing and able for meaning to come to him – even if it is very slowly, which it usually does.

John Holt

Holt even gives lots of examples of children as young as three and four teaching themselves to read, just because they want to, they can and it is fun.

The Classroom Environment

With such extraordinary raw material, what goes wrong in the classroom?

Let’s face it: school attendance is compulsory, and the content of the curriculum is almost always selected on the basis of what society – rather the learners themselves – consider important. Furthermore, it is also difficult for the students who are in the most energetic years of their lives to spend what seem to them terribly long periods of time confined to the relatively small space of the classroom, and the fact that they are continuously monitored and assessed does not add to their well-being either. Zoltan Dornyei

By the time we become teachers, we have no difficulty accepting school as the most natural environment for learning, but it so many ways it is not. Children have not chosen to be there, they have no power over what they do on any given day and they lose their individuality and special-ness in the crowd. When we are training to become teachers, how many of us consider this? Dealing with disruptive behaviour may be a module on a teacher training course, but is dealing with thirty five individual children who may be uncomfortable, unhappy and frustrated and therefore not motivated? It seems to me that a huge part of what we have to do as teachers is address this. First we need to understand how our students are feeling, for learning, especially learning a language, is just as affective as it is cognitive, that means: we must address not just the students’ heads but also their hearts.

What we need to consider is how, despite all the drawbacks of being in school and having to work within the constrictions that that entails, we can foster children’s will to learn. First we have to acknowledge what, or who, may be inhibiting learning and then takes steps to remedy the situation as best we can.