Methodology in Language Learning: Temporal Variation.

 

The cognitive–situated approach drew attention to another, rather neglected, aspect of motivation: its dynamic character and temporal variation. motivation is examined in its relationship to specific learner behaviors and classroom processes, there is a need to adopt a process-oriented approach/ paradigm that can account for the daily ups and downs of motivation to learn, that is, the ongoing changes of motivation over time. Even during a single L2 class one can notice that language-learning motivation shows a certain amount of changeability, and in the context of learning a language for several months or years, or over a lifetime, motivation is expected to go through rather diverse phases. Looking at it from this perspective, motivation is not seen as a static attribute but rather as a dynamic factor that displays continuous fluctuation. As the following quote demonstrates, this characteristic of motivation is becoming a basic assumption in contemporary motivational psychology: “Many of the tasks faced by students extend over time, and one of the prime characteristics of motivation is that it ebbs and flows”. With language acquisition being a particularly lengthy learning process, the potential importance of a temporal perspective that includes the division of various motivational phases has not gone unnoticed in L2 research.

 

The motivational process is clustered into several discrete temporal segments, organized along the progression that describes how initial wishes and desires are first transformed into goals and then into operationalized intentions, and how these intentions are enacted, leading (hopefully) to the accomplishment of the goal and concluded by the final evaluation of the process.

 

1.  Preactional Stage: First, motivation needs to be generated—the motivational dimension related to this initial phase can be referred to as choice motivation, because the generated motivation leads to the selection of the goal or task that the individual will pursue.

2.  Actional Stage: Second, the generated motivation needs to be actively maintained and protected while the particular action lasts. This motivational dimension has been referred to as executive motivation, and it is particularly relevant to sustained activities such as studying an L2, and especially to learning in classroom settings, where students are exposed a great number of distracting influences, such as off-task thoughts, irrelevant distractions from others, anxiety about the tasks, or physical conditions that make it difficult to complete the task.

3.  Postactional Stage: There is a third phase following the completion of the action—termed motivational retrospection—which concerns the learners’ retrospective evaluation of how things went. The way students process their past experiences in this retrospective phase will determine the kind of activities they will be motivated to pursue in the future.

 

 

Phases are associated with largely different motives. That is, people are influenced by a set of factors while they are still contemplating an action that is different from the motives that influence them once they have embarked on the activity. And similarly, when they look back at what they have achieved and evaluate it, again a new set of motivational components will become relevant. Thus, we can organize the manifold motives that are relevant to language learning by grouping them according to which actional phase they are related to. An important corollary of this perspective is that different motivational systems advocated in the literature do not necessarily exclude each other but can be valid at the same time if they affect different stages of the motivational processes.

 

As already pointed out when discussing task motivation, the task-specific behavior characterizing a concrete learning activity is not entirely independent of the actional character of the whole course, and this behavioral domain is further embedded in the complex tapestry of other activities in the particular school. These actional contexts generate somewhat different motivational mind sets in the students, resulting in a task motivation complex that is made up of motivational influences associated with various levels of action-oriented contingencies or hierarchical action sequences.

Based on the learners’ personal histories, we discovered a number of salient recurring temporal patterns and motivational transformation episodes in the learners’ lives that resulted in the profound restructuring of their motivational disposition. Six such motivation-specific temporal themes were identified:

Ø maturation and gradually increasing interest,

Ø standstill period,

Ø moving into a new life phase,

Ø internalizing external goals and imported visions,

Ø relationship with a significant other,

Ø time spent in the host environment.

 

The study of L2 motivation has made considerable progress, adopting new research paradigms and approaches. The brief outline, however, could not give us more than a cursory overview of the specific issues.

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