Methodology in Language Learning: The Process-Oriented Period

 

The cognitive–situated approach soon drew attention to another, rather neglected, aspect of motivation: its dynamic character and temporal variation. When 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. “Many of the tasks faced by students extend over time, and as noted in chapter 1 of any Introduction to Motivation text, 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. There are separated three stages of the motivation process along a continuum: “Reasons for doing something” ® “Deciding to do something” ® “Sustaining the effort, or persisting.” The first two stages involved initiating motivation whereas the third stage involved sustaining motivation. The common experience appears to be motivational flux rather than stability, which highlights the “notion of a temporal frame of reference shaping motivational thinking”

 

The motivational process consists of 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.

    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.

 

    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 to 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.

 

    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.

A key tenet of the process-oriented approach is that these three actional 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 process.

Academic motivation is—hopefully—an important facet of the learners’ general disposition toward attending school, the classroom is also a social arena in which students go through some of the key developmental experiences in their lives, such as establishing friendships, falling in love and experimenting with increasingly elaborate personal identities. Thus, academic goals will be accompanied by different social goals and practicing teachers know all too well how such social agendas can modify or disrupt the academic action sequence.

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

 

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