Study with the several resources on Docsity
Earn points by helping other students or get them with a premium plan
Prepare for your exams
Study with the several resources on Docsity
Earn points to download
Earn points by helping other students or get them with a premium plan
The aim of this essay was to explore the issue of motivation and gain better ... Keywords: motivation, intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, immediacy.
Typology: Study notes
1 / 63
This page cannot be seen from the preview
Don't miss anything!
Högskolan i Halmstad Sektionen för lärarutbildning (LUT) Engelska 61-90 (LENG61-90 vt13) C-uppsats 15 HP VT 2013
Author: Daniel Kvick Supervisor: Veronica Brock Examiner: Veronica Brock, Stuart Foster, Monica Karlsson
"I (Daniel Kvick) declare that this work or any part thereof has not been previously submitted in any form to the University or to any other institutional body whether for assessment or for other purposes. Save for any express acknowledgements, references and/or bibliographies cited in the work, I confirm that the intellectual content of the work is the result of my own efforts and of no other person. Similarly, I take full personal responsibility for any errors or inaccuracies that remain in the content and the language of the text"
Appendix B 46 Appendix C 47
1. Abstract
The aim of this essay was to explore the issue of motivation and gain better understanding of what motivation in the school environment is all about. Is it just a term we use in our everyday life without putting any meaning into what we really mean by it? I have centered my work around the following questions:
The research for this essay was carried out in two ways. The first part was to complete an online survey, which was then e-mailed to several teachers in the Laholm area. The second part consisted of a series of interviews with four different teachers which centered around the questions stated above. The teachers, who were between the age of 31-51, were all working at Osbecksgymnasiet in Laholm (Upper-Secondary-school) and were all teaching different sets of subjects (English, French, Maths, Swedish, Physical education, and Sciences). Interviewing teachers from a variety of subjects rather that just focusing on English gave me an opportunity to compare attitudes towards the different subjects. The interviews were carried out in the school, and varied between 44 minutes to 1 hour and 24 minutes
2. Introduction
Motivation is the foundation of everything in life. We need it to be able to get up in the morning and transport ourselves to our various jobs or schools. We need it to withstand boredom or struggle. Some people need motivation just to know whether or not to live. But what exactly is motivation? The Swedish dictionary (Nationalencyklopedin) describes it as a ”psychological term for the factors within an individual that raises, forms and aims the behavior towards certain goals. Theories about motivation explain why we on the whole act and why we do certain things rather than other things” (http://www.ne.se.ezproxy.bib.hh.se/lang/motivation) 1 (Author’s translation)
On that basis, it is clear that it is a psychological aspect of our life. It is a sort of biological drive that we all have inside us, something that keeps us moving (Dörnyei & Ushioda, 2011, p. 3). You could make a comparison with wild animals. They are all motivated to find food and to survive. That inner drive is something inherited in their genes. As humans we have the same type of genetic drive to survive. At the same time, we are also motivated to make progress. We want to make our lives better. We want to see and experience new things and grow both as an individual and as a group. This motivation is also driven through language and culture. We learn to do things by putting into practice what we have seen and heard. The first place in which we learn about language and culture is usually in the home together with our families. It is the place were we hear our first sounds and speak our first words. It is also where the quest for finding out more about the world starts, and it usually starts with the help of our guardians.
As a child growing up you have a responsibility to listen to your primary caregivers and do what they tell you to do. For the most part, all children do this to a certain degree and learn how the world functions not only through their own eyes, but also with the values imposed by their nurturers.
It is with this background that the child later on ends up within the compulsory school system where they are usually tutored by someone other than one of their primary caregivers; a totally new person with a mission to make them do things they would not necessarily do if they were to stay at home ! (^1) psykologisk term för de faktorer hos individen som väcker, formar och riktar beteendet mot olika mål. Teorier om motivation förklarar varför vi över huvud taget handlar och varför vi gör vissa saker snarare än andra.
Something else that is also highly important for students in order to succeed in school is their relationships with other students. Class-mates should share a common bond that surpasses the boundaries of class, sex, race or religion. Together they should be able to help each other out and learn how to be successful by comparing results and giving advice:
Enjoying positive relationships with peers also can lead directly to resources and information that help students learn. By virtue of the fact that they are socially accepted, it is reasonable to assume that students who get along with their peers will also have access to peer resources that can promote the development of social and academic competencies. These resources can take the form of information and advice, modeled behavior, or specific experiences that facilitate learning. (Elliot A. & Dweck C., eds, 2005, p. 289)
My original intention of finding out more about motivation was centered around language learning, and learning English in particular. However, as time went by, I realized that motivation in the classroom is such a wide area of investigation that it would be foolish of me to limit the research to the English class when trying to gain a good ”overview” of the subject.
As motivation is the topic of this essay, I also felt that it was important to find a way of motivating the reader to engage with my research. Thus, it became important for me to write this essay in a form that was readable to a wide audience, academics and teachers alike. It is for this reason I also carried out the research through a qualitative rather than a quantitative approach and use a more informal and less conventional style in my writing. Rather than quantify my results, my aim is ”to provide a rich and vivid description so that ‘the reader can vicariously experience what it is to be in the same situation as the research participants’” (Johnson and Christensen, in Dörnyei, 2007, p.
My intention in carrying out the research was never really to find any definitive answers but instead to pose questions that would give teachers a chance to reflect subjectively and conjure up their most honest feelings on the topic of motivation in a school context. Therefore, I deliberately give the teachers the strongest voice in this work and allow them to tell their own stories and shift the voice of the experts in the literature to the background. I have chosen to weave literary quotes and references together with the teachers’ answers and my own thoughts throughout the essay in order to make it more meaningful:
”Qualitative research offers writers the freedom to have their own as well as their participants voices heard, which can be turned into a powerful presentation tool […] the qualitative writer has all the ingredients at his/ her disposal to produce a vivid, detail-rich, dramatized story which can be a far better read then a report of the results of a multiple analysis of variance.” (Sandelowski, in Dörnyei, 2007 p. 293)
In this way the essay contains far more details than a traditional academic essay, a more ”informal tone” and ”describes multiple meanings” (Dörnyei, 2007, p. 293).
As with many texts that have been written in this format, the researcher’s involvement tends to make itself known throughout the text. The inclusion of quotes from interviews reflect the subjective feelings of the participating teachers, and also allow me, the researcher, to add my voice. To ask a question regarding something as wide as motivation and to expect an answer without the researcher’s involvement in the discussion is not only less interesting, but also very impractical, as their constant involvement leads the discussion into new areas and can evoke thought processes that weren’t originally intended.
Literature Review Although my aim and priority is to present the teachers‘ voice in this essay, rather than that of the ”experts” I will explain briefly what the literature says about motivation in general, and in the school context in particular. As mentioned earlier, the Swedish dictionary (Nationalencyklopedin) defines motivation as a ”psychological term for the factors within an individual that raises, forms and aims the behavior towards certain goals”. In my opinion, this definition of motivation is not particularly clear. It is summarized in a neat way, but to better understand how motivation in the school context is attained, we need to take a closer look at what other literature has said about it. Ausubel (in Abdesslem, 2002, p.3) lists six factors in determining motivation:
(i)- the need for exploration or probing the unknown, (ii)- the need for manipulation or causing change to the environment, (iii)- the need for mental or physical activity, (iv)- the need for stimulation by the environment; this included other people, other thoughts and feelings. The above four factors gave rise to a fifth factor (v)- the need for knowledge, "the need to process and internalize the results of exploration, manipulation, activity, and stimulation, to solve contradictions, to quest for solutions to problems and self-consistent systems of knowledge […] The sixth factor which may be a consequence of the fifth one was (vi)- the need for ego-enhancement."
Number 7-10 are also general and can be applied to all subjects. Number 10 can also be applied to any other context, as it is essential to familiarize students with everything that surrounds any given subject. This allows them to understand that the subject is not only dealt with in school, but can be applied just as well in the real world. For instance, it is important for a teacher to promote learner autonomy (no.7), as it will make the students more independent rather than relying on their teachers for guidance. It will be easier for them to search for information by using techniques given by the teacher instead of constantly having to ask them for the correct answer.
Dörnyei (2011, p. 20) also discusses something called the ”goal-setting theory”. He believes that in order to reach success in a task, you should have specific and attainable goals. He outlines the theory in the following five points:
Maehr & Yamaguchi (in Salili, Chiu and Hong, 2001, p. 134) also mention similar ideas concerning goal setting/orientation:
Task goals focus on the task per se: progress in learning and mastering a skill, intrigue with an unanswered question. […] Task goals (compared to ego goals) are more likely to be associated with deep processing, the use of more effective learning strategies, and the lesser use of self-handicapping - with an overall more adaptive learning pattern
Both views establish goal setting or goal orientation as the primary aim for students, in a belief that adopting that kind of attitude when attempting a task is likely to generate good results.
In my essay, I have centered my work around the following questions:
As a part of my research, I describe a situation where I introduced a motivating task during my teaching practice with a group of students in a secondary school. The task consisted of writing personal letters in English to real people living in Scotland. I describe the task, what the students did and what their reactions were, and what I learned from it. This section will be found in Appendix A.
In hindsight, it occurred to me that I could have got more out of the question if I were to pose the alternatives differently. The alternative ”No meaning at all” was not necessary as there appear to be no teachers who believe that motivation has no meaning at all.
All and all, I managed to arrange a total of four interviews (all with teachers in the same school), and received a total of eight returned questionnaires
3.3 The interviews Prior to the interviews I equipped myself with an iPhone as a recording device. As I had written down all of my questions in a document which I opened on the phone, I was able to easily sit back and enjoy the conversations without having to continually bend over to write down what the interviewee said. The disadvantage, however, was that I had to listen to the recordings and then translate them into English. However, I believed that the work would be worth it, as I could fully concentrate on the interview and ask the teachers relevant and interesting follow-up questions.
The interviews were carried out in Swedish. The recorded material was then transcribed, and the quotes I decided to use in the essay were roughly translated. Therefore, the quotes in this essay do not exactly match the answers I got in Swedish; they are my own rough translations. The full answers in Swedish given by the teachers (With fictitious names) are at the end of the essay (see appendix B).
The next section of the essay is framed by the questions posed and the teacher’s answers given. Thus, the answers are analyzed, compared and discussed within the same section. There are also sub-headings when I indicate the occurrence of a theme. The respondents (aged between 31-51) will be referred to as T1, T2, T3 and T4.
4. Results + discussion
To understand the relationship teachers have with the word ”motivation” I wanted to begin by posing a very broad question which would allow them to come up with their own definition and perceptions of ”motivation in the school context”. It gave them a chance to reflect deeply on what motivation means to them and how they work with it in their everyday teaching.
For me, motivation in a school context is all about inspiring students to learn certain subjects for the joy of learning something new, and to convince them that what they are learning is actually helpful for them, not necessarily right now, but in the long run. According to Stipek, (in Salili, Chiu and Hong, 2001) ”motivation is an important factor in maximizing children’s learning”. This view was supported by most of the teachers interviewed:
T1: It’s what it is all about! Motivation is the most important thing. If I can get my students motivated my job becomes so much easier. If you get them motivated they will perform their tasks even if they find them boring because they understand the purpose of doing them. You have to see the purpose of what you do. Motivation is my biggest mission.
Students can often be troublesome when it comes to doing things which they consider are of little importance. Similarly, if a task feels difficult and if they do not manage to understand it they will often just surrender and say that the task is not that important. However, as T1 said, ” Motivation is my biggest mission ”. If all teachers shared the same type of view, students would perhaps feel that it is worth undertaking the task, even if it is boring and seems unimportant at the time. However, to most students, the importance of a task is not always a convincing argument for why they should learn something. Even if teachers feel they can evoke inner motivation in students, it is not guaranteed that they will actually do the task
4.1.1 Inner or outer (Extrinsic Vs. Intrinsic) Extrinsic motivation is more simply known as ”outer” motivation, i.e. motivation that stems from expectations from society or even family. Intrinsic or ”inner” motivation, on the other hand, is when you choose to undertake a task without any ”external” expectations or pressure. You do it
Sakui & Cowie (2011, p. 205) believe that ”There is some evidence that EFL teachers view intrinsic motivation, the motivation to carry out an action such as learning a language for its own reward, as being the best form of motivation”. The fact that students can become motivated to reach a certain level of understanding seems to be something teachers strive for. Conversely, the motivation to get a certain grade does not appear to be regarded as positively by teachers as the motivation to learn something for inner purposes. Why is it that motivation is not as highly regarded when it comes to preparing for a test, or striving to reach a certain grade? If students are able to reach a score on a test does it not prove that they have reached a certain level of understanding? I can only ask myself to what degree I was able to learn for the sake of learning for life, or just to learn in order to pass a test and get a grade. I think I wanted to learn for life. I have always been the kind of person who loves to ask questions and longs to find out how everything in society and nature works, and I think all children have that curiosity, particularly between the ages of 1-13. However, as discussed with T3, something usually happens at the beginning of adolescence, and by the time most of them reach the age of 8-12 they start to realize that the world is not the perfect place they originally thought it was. They finally learn that they cannot fly a helicopter to the moon because grownups have told them that it doesn’t work that way. Their creative thinking becomes stifled and they are forced to think logically instead, which is one way of viewing it.
4.1.2 The fear of being evaluated It could also be that it is at the age of 11-13, or even earlier, that students start to get evaluated. Maybe it is the evaluation part that creates a feeling of uneasiness in many students and makes them afraid of failure. Suddenly everyone has started to tell you that you have to start producing good results in order to get somewhere in life.
In the educational contexts that allow children considerable freedom to initiate activities and complete tasks without pressure to conform to a particular model or to get right answers, children selected more challenging tasks, were less dependent on an adult for approval, and evidenced more pride in their accomplishments (Salili et. al, eds, 2001, p. 282-283)
When they reach that level, many students start to realize that it may harm them to ask questions out of curiosity. They are afraid that asking a ”stupid” question might lower the teacher’s perception of their knowledge and in the long-run harm their final grade.
T3: I think the students don’t want to learn too much because they feel they only have a limited amount of space for memory in their brain and they only want to use that space for something important […] They are very afraid of asking questions, because they are afraid that the question might make their final grade worse
I believe a lot of students can relate to the statement above. It is no secret that young students tend to feel stressed in school, (http://www.mynewsdesk.com/se/radda_barnen/pressreleases/sex-av-tio- elever-upplever-stress-i-skolan-671731) part of that could be due to feeling anxious about making yourself look incompetent, but also a fear of not getting the help you need. Asking a question to gain information about something you feel you have to know can be intimidating for many people, not only children. School is no exception. It doesn’t matter that school is supposed to be a learning environment which allows all types of questions to be asked. Most students know that everything you do and say in school can influence your overall grade, so you have to be careful with what you say. However, many teachers are aware of this and tell their students in advance that they are allowed to ask ”silly” questions, because we are all in a learning environment where it is ok to fail, and where it is ok not to understand something immediately.
All students have their own perception of what makes for a motivating and fun task. Some students love to engage in group activities, whereas others may prefer a lecture from their teacher, where they just have to sit back and listen to the teacher’s knowledge of the subject. It is very important, however, that teachers do not just become comfortable with their way of presenting knowledge, and stick to the same old routine. They have to reinvent themselves all the time in order to make classes interesting for all their students. Varying tasks is essential if you want to avoid having students that are bored (Lightbown & Spada, 2006, p.65) However, it is also important to know to what extent the students’ opinion of what makes for a motivating task matches the teacher’s.
”The principal way that teachers can influence learners’ motivation is by making the classroom a supportive environment in which students are stimulated, engaged in activities that are appropriate to their age, interests, and cultural backgrounds, and, most importantly, where students can experience success. This in turn can contribute to positive motivation, leading to still greater success”. (Lightbown & Spada, 2006, p.185)
