Methodology in Language Learning: Teacher Motivation

 

The area worth examining and is without a doubt the motivational characteristics of the language teacher. There is  that teacher motivation is an important factor in understanding the affective basis of instructed SLA, since the teacher’s motivation has significant bearings on the students’ motivational disposition and, more generally, on their learning achievement. Furthermore, the study of teacher motivation can help us understand a looming crisis in the field of education in general: the growing disillusionment of teachers of all subject matters and the growing rate of their leaving the profession in many parts of the world. For example, a recent survey in Poland that involved more than 689 000 practicing teachers. Found that 34% of them did not expect to be a teacher in five years’ time and 56% claimed that their level of morale/motivation was lower than when they first became teachers. Not surprisingly, then, only 50% of the sample said that they would consider a career in teaching if they had the choice again. These figures reflect a broad, worldwide tendency and the situation of language teachers is in no way better than that of their colleagues in other subject areas.

 

The conceptualization of L2 motivation from a self-perspective opens up a whole new avenue for promoting student motivation by means of increasing the elaborateness and vividness of self-relevant imagery in the students. This is, in fact, similar to the promotion of commitment control strategies just described, but our more detailed understanding of the nature of possible selves offers a rich and systematic source of motivational ideas.

 

 

The following conditions can be seen to increase the motivational power of a possible self:

v  The possible self needs to exist. Not everyone can easily generate a highly successful possible self and therefore the strength of the motivation resulting from the desire to reduce the discrepancy between one’s actual and ideal L2 self will be dependent on the learner’s ability to develop a salient vision of oneself as an attractive, competent, and successful L2 user.

v  The possible self needs to be primed. Each individual has a number of different self-representations concerning different content areas as well as different types of hopes and fears, and the working self-concept, which is the accessible and functional self-concept of the moment, is a “biased sample from the universe of one’s self-representations” For a particular self-representation such as the Ideal L2 Self to become active, it needs to be triggered by some relevant event or needs to be consciously invoked by the individual as a response to an event.

v  The possible self needs to be associated with relevant procedural knowledge. A desired end-state will have an impact on behavior only if the individual can personalize it by building a bridge of self-representations between one’s current self and the hoped-for self. That is, the more elaborate a possible self in terms of concrete and relevant action plans, scripts, and strategies, the more effectively it can function as a regulator of instrumental action.

v  The possible self should be offset by a countervailing possible self in the same domain. Positive expected selves will be maximally effective if are linked with representations of what could happen if the desired state was not realized.

 

 

             The analysis of “Passion, vision, and action” shows that by focusing on the vision aspect we can design some powerful novel motivational practices. It also seems highly likely that if we approach the promotion of a motivational teaching practice from a self-perspective, the importance of social mediation—either as a result of the teacher’s explicit modeling function or of the more indirect role of the peer group—will gain particular prominence

 

The paradigm shift from the macro- to the micro perspective had a liberating effect on L2 motivation research, leading to an unprecedented boom in the field. On the other hand, with regard to the main question as to whether the field can accommodate the concept of motivation in its psychological richness, the jury is still out.

 

 

©

 

University of Oxford - post gradual studies 2009 'English Language Teaching'

 

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