Motivation | Oxford University Press

8 April 2013
by Oxford University Press ELT 5 Comments

Getting the hares back in the race

Ahead of his talk at IATEFL Liverpool, Edmund Dudley looks at ways of motivating certain difficult types of teenage learners.

I have two types of teenage student.

First, there are the tortoises. They feel they do not have enough English lessons in a week. Whatever their level of English might be, they feel it is not good enough – or that they will never be good enough to have a conversation with a native speaker or to enjoy a film in English. They feel slow and awkward.

I know how to work with this kind of student – and how important it is to be patient, encouraging and supportive. I think we all do.

What about the second type?

The second type are the hares. They are the ones who feel that they have too many English lessons in a week. They are happy with their level of English – in fact, they are in a kind of comfort zone. They can speak well in class – when they feel like it. They watch films and TV series in English outside class without much difficulty. They like and value English. They just don’t want to spend time studying English in class. They would rather sleep!

Does that sound familiar?

If so, here are some questions to consider. What is the best way to work with teenagers like this? How can we get them out of their comfort zone? Is there any way to help them rediscover their appetite for learning English? How can we get them back in the race?

Over the years I have had to work with a lot of hares. It is quite a challenge.

Tortoises tend to be pretty hard on themselves; hares, on the other hand, give themselves an easy ride. In order to motivate them, we need to be able devise tasks and activities that appeal to their sense of challenge, relevance, value and novelty.

My session will consider these key concepts in the context of the classroom and will illustrate them with practical examples taken from my own classroom in Pécs, Hungary.

So what can you expect?

Challenge

We will look at an innovative way of getting students to give presentations in class. Prepare for PowerPoint shows as you have never seen them done before!

Relevance

Can I get a witness? How accurate would you be if you had to give an eyewitness account? There will be a chance for you to test your own powers of observation – and hear about an idea that will put your students in the witness box.

Value

‘What do you want to do?’ is a question frequently associated with the learner-centred teacher. I will be trying to put a new spin on this question, to give it new significance by sharing a simple but striking way to highlight community connections and promote real awareness among students.

Novelty

Try talking about learning strategies and study skills to your students – and watch their eyes glaze over. I will be sharing a novel technique for displaying notes and answering language questions that help students to go with the flow.

So whether your teenage students are tortoises, hares – or a combination of both – I hope there will be something in the workshop to help keep them in the race!

Ideas and activities in the session will be linked to OUP’s insight series.

Edmund Dudley will be talking about High-Achieving Secondary Students: An Insight into Motivation and Challenge at IATEFL Liverpool on Thursday 11th April in Hall 13 at 2:45pm. You can also find him at Ed in the crowds, his personal blog.

21 November 2012
by Oxford University Press ELT 11 Comments

Recognition and motivation

Audience applauding Fiona Thomas is an EFL blogger and Director of Education at Net Languages, a large online language school. Here she considers the importance of recognition and motivation for teachers to excel at their jobs.

How appreciated do you feel in your job? It doesn’t matter what position you hold, everybody likes to feel that their colleagues, boss and people they are responsible for appreciate them when they work hard and do their job well. However, too many teachers and managers suffer from the frustration of feeling that what they do goes unrecognised and unappreciated.

Why is recognition so important? Frederick Herzberg spent much of his professional life researching what motivates people in the work place. His findings show that when a person is recognised for a high level of performance at work, this has a powerful effect on motivation (Herzberg, 1987).

He distinguished between what he classified as hygiene factors and motivational factors. Hygiene factors are those factors which need to be in place for us to be able to do our job. If these factors are not satisfactorily covered, they will cause anxiety, distract us from our job and lead to demotivation and general dissatisfaction – e.g. if we do not earn enough money to cover our general needs and expenses, we will not be able to focus on our work. However, these factors do not actually motivate us – e.g. if we are given a pay increase (money is a hygiene factor), the effect of the pay rise on our motivation is, in theory, very short-lived. We soon get used to earning more money and as a consequence, its effectiveness in terms of motivation is soon lost.

Motivational factors, on the other hand, are factors which make a difference to how the worker feels about their job in a longer lasting way. Herzberg cited the following areas as motivational: achievement, recognition, the work itself, responsibility, and advancement. These, therefore, are the areas that language schools need to focus on in order to motivate the people who work there. And of these factors recognition is arguably one of the easiest to apply.

Recognition needs to happen all the way down the hierarchical ladder of any organisation, from Directors to DOSs and other managers, to level coordinators and to teachers. If the person who is directly responsible for us does not seem to notice or care when we perform outstandingly, we understandably feel unappreciated. This in turn can affect our work performance to the detriment of the organisation we work for.

Recognition from colleagues or those higher up the ladder can also be very effective at motivating us. This, I believe, tends to happen most in a climate where there is a general sense of well-being and appreciation within an organisation. People who work in an environment where recognition is part of the institutional culture are much more likely to reciprocate in kind.

Interestingly, people often receive more recognition from their PLNs (personal learning networks) than from the place where they work. The growth in online PLN communities has helped to provide the support and recognition which helps teachers and managers to develop as professionals, especially when this is lacking in the institutions that employ them. It seems, however, such a wasted opportunity that this potential is not exploited positively by these organisations.

It is somewhat ironic that teachers are trained to give praise, recognition and encouragement to their students (sometimes in excess, according to Jim Scrivener, but this is part of a different debate). However, when these teachers are promoted to management positions, they tend to forget to apply the same good practice to the people they are now responsible for. Managers seem to have become so busy directing or managing in their new positions that they forget to apply the same basic effective principles they used when managing students in a class.

If we strive to have vibrant, high-quality language organisations, the motivation of students, teachers, managers, and all other staff is an essential part of good management practice. If we accept that taking the time to recognise good work can make a significant difference to people’s levels of motivation, then language organisations would be well advised to make sure that the recognition of people’s merits, initiatives and hard work becomes part of their institutional culture.

Reference:

Herzberg, F.I. 1987, ‘One more time: How do you motivate employees?’, Harvard Business Review, Sep/Oct87, Vol. 65 Issue 5, p109-120

19 January 2012
by Oxford University Press ELT 10 Comments

A Letter to My Younger Self

Young woman thinking as she writes Meghan Beler is a full-time teacher trainer for Oxford University Press in Istanbul, Turkey. In this piece she writes a letter to herself about things she wished she knew when she first started teaching.

Dear Younger Self,

As you have probably realised by now, teaching is hard work. On top of a full teaching load you have to deal with homework, exams, misbehaving students, staff meetings and (gasp!) students’ parents. You are experiencing a lot of uncertainty and ups and downs, sometimes even on an hourly basis. You may feel that you don’t have enough time to plan the spectacular lessons you dreamt of when you were training to become a teacher. I remember what it feels like to be a new teacher, so I would like to offer you some simple advice that can help you deal with some of the challenges you are currently facing.

Choice: First of all, don’t be afraid to give your students choices about their learning. As a teacher, it’s very easy to fall into a pattern of being the decision-maker, judge and jury in the classroom, but allowing choice is an important part of helping students become autonomous learners. By having your students make some decisions in the classroom, you can also increase their involvement and enjoyment of your lessons. Start with something simple, such as allowing students to choose which questions from an exercise that they would like to answer. You might also consider asking them how they would like to carry out an activity – individually, in pairs or in groups? Homework and projects are other areas where choice is a possibility. If you want them to get more practice with past simple at home, give them some options and take a whole class vote, for example:

Write a short composition about your last holiday.
Record yourself talking about what you did last weekend.
Prepare a ‘past simple’ quiz for your classmates.

This allows you to cater to different learning styles while encouraging students to take responsibility for their own learning. For learners who are not accustomed to being given choice in the classroom, this new responsibility may come as a shock to them and they may struggle to come up with ideas or even try to ‘cheat’ the system. But with a bit of persistence and optimism on your part, you will be amazed at the wonderful ideas your students can come up with.

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12 January 2012
by Oxford University Press ELT 3 Comments

10 Commandments for motivating language learners: #9 Create a pleasant, relaxed atmosphere in the classroom

Blonde woman smiling in college class Continuing the 10 Commandments for motivating language learners series, Tim Ward, a freelance teacher trainer in Bulgaria, takes a closer look at number nine of the 10 Commandments: Create a pleasant, relaxed atmosphere in the classroom.

This is the latest of the blogs dealing with the vexed matter of motivation. A recap: I’ve been musing on the 10 Commandments of Motivation as categorised by two top Hungarians, Zoltan Dornyei and Kata Czizer, and wondering what their practical ramifications might be. In some senses, I’ve left the most interesting two till last. One is the imperative to create a pleasant relaxed atmosphere in the classroom. This is about the physical properties of the classroom, by the way, and not so much about the human relationships inside it – though one way of looking at it is to think about how the classroom atmosphere can facilitate good relationships and an atmosphere conducive to learning.

I’m loath to provide any recipes here as so much depends on the context you’re working in and, for example, the physical condition of a classroom in a state university in my part of post-communist Europe is very different from the state-of-the-art hi-tech private schools students might be in. But atmospheres can always be better and there is a framework to think about them provided by the senses. Why? Well, we know enough from research to have, to say the least, strong suspicions that brains do not thrive in environments with a narrow range of stimuli. In plainer English, poorly kept classrooms inhibit learning. I should say here I’m relying on one of my favourite books on this area – it’s Using Brainpower in the Classroom: 5 Steps to Accelerate Learning by Steve Garnett, and it says some hugely useful things about the classroom environment.

One place to start is with the display. I’m a great believer in displaying students’ work, even that of adults (as long as of course that it’s not kept on the wall too long). It’s not just about self-esteem, though seeing your work displayed is likely to increase that. There are also important learning points here. Writing should always be for an audience, and displaying writing gives any bit of work a wider audience than just the teacher. The posters that come with English File can be enormously useful too. If they are legible from anywhere in the room and positioned at eye-level, long term recall of their learning points can be as high as 75%. If we replace these learning displays frequently, then obviously more knowledge can be learnt, almost passively, in this way.

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25 October 2011
by Oxford University Press ELT 2 Comments

10 Commandments for motivating language learners: #2 Develop a good relationship with the learners

Teacher talking with her students Continuing the 10 Commandments for motivating language learners series, Tim Ward, a freelance teacher trainer in Bulgaria, takes a closer look at the second of the 10 Commandments: Develop a good relationship with the learners.

Let’s begin with a story about stubborn donkeys, carrots, and sticks. There are, the proverb says, two ways of encouraging donkeys to move. One is to dangle a carrot at the front end of the beast and the second to apply a stick at the other end. Which is more effective depends on the nature of the particular animal.

What’s this got to do with teaching English? Well, where I live there are still a lot of people who think about motivation in schools in much the same terms, as a concept that depends on external rewards and punishments. And in some ways that seems common sense – what else is going to work?

Luckily, this isn’t necessarily true. Look at this quote on Goal Contents Theory a quick Google search found:

Extrinsic goals such as financial success, appearance, and popularity/fame have been specifically contrasted with intrinsic goals such as community, close relationships, and personal growth, with the former more likely associated with lower wellness and greater ill-being. (http://www.psych.rochester.edu/SDT/theory.php)

Or, to put this another way, the soft skills involved in teaching can be much more powerful than the rewards students can see waiting at the end of their course. Relationships matter.

There are probably as many ways of having a good relationship with your students as there are good teachers in the world, but here are some things which you’d usually expect to see.

First up, listening. The Scots have a saying: Listen twice before you speak once. That seems to me pretty good advice for teachers, both in terms of dealing with any problems that crop up in class and when listening to students’ English – we should listen first for what our students are actually saying before listening for mistakes. And when we’re monitoring it’s a good way of entering into a dialogue (I’m looking at New English File Intermediate 4C, where students are talking in pairs about matters like ‘a teacher at school you used to hate, a singer you used to listen to a lot and who you still like, a friend you used to have but who you’ve lost touch with’ and so on). These are personal things and if we can listen and share them, that’s great. Showing an interest in learners as human beings is what it’s about here.

Of course there are many reasons to listen. Another is provided by one more great source of proverbs, anon: A good listener is a silent flatterer. Flattery makes us feel good, and properly listening (paying complete attention, maintaining eye contact, thinking about the message as well as the language) will foster self-respect and respect for the classroom.

Linked to this are a number of other features of good relationships. Showing sympathy for problems is important, of course, though how you go about showing that depends on who you are. And how far you might want to take relationships outside class is a personal matter, too. Some teachers I know will email their students (I’m old fashioned: they may even be befriending on Facebook, for all I know), while some wouldn’t dream of it. But even if the extra-classroom relationship is just a casual word in the corridor, then it’s a positive step.

And jokes, they’re apparently a good thing, too!

How do you develop relationships with your students?

Remind yourself of the 10 Commandments for motivating language learners and look out for future posts by Tim exploring the remaining Commandments.

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