Student Motivation

Human beings endlessly demonstrate that with enough motivation, records can be broken, tides can be turned, history can be made, and the world can be changed.

It is no surprise then that teachers and schools care greatly about student motivation: about generating, influencing, and maximising it. Higher motivation clearly means better results, and extraordinary motivation usually means extraordinary results.

That said, I have often found conversations relating to the question of motivation to be very muddled.

I was once told that I must be "demanding" with a particular group of adult students who were in two minds about studying English during work hours. I have also seen teachers advertise themselves using this word " demanding", as if it is a good thing.

It seems that, "motivating students", often get's mixed up with simply applying pressure; with reproaching and reprimanding students for laziness and so on, rather like with children at school.

In school this approach works fine, because punishments can be dished out if students don't complete the work - for better or worse, the teacher has actual leverage against the students with which to apply sheer pressure.

But with ESL this is rarely the case. And to posture as a 'strict teacher' with paying adult customers is absurd. Simply telling someone sternly that they should apply themselves more is hardly going to make a rational person want to do that, because this doesn’t give them any actual reason to increase the investment of time and energy into English study, which of course also involves decreasing their investment in other pursuits.

But there usually are ways of genuinely motivating students, using reason.

Motivation is bound up with what that student thinks they can get out of their investment of time and energy. The greater the perceived return on investment, the greater the motivation to do that thing.

So rational ways of motivating adult students all revolve around this principle.

1.       Convincing students of the true value of learning a language

For many students, the perceived benefits of learning a language are limited to the immediate and obvious skill of using the target language to communicate: in work, in relationships, on holiday, and for reading and watching films.

But there are reams of studies showing a whole host of profound additional benefits to learning a language: cognitive ability, problem solving skills, improved communication in the native language, overall self-esteem and confidence.

In short, the return on the investment of time and energy is actually much larger what many students perceive. To convince them of this point is to genuinely motivate them.

Moreover, all of these additional and secondary benefits of learning a language may well be things that students are pursuing by other means – through brain-training puzzles, self-development books, yoga, life coaching and so on.

A teacher can try to persuade students that learning a language is like killing many birds with one stone, and that the student can therefore afford to sacrifice some of the time and money spent on other means of self-development in order to focus on learning a foreign language.

2.       Adding Value through Enquiry-Based learning

With inquiry based learning, students are pursuing new knowledge in the lesson which they are interested in already. This means a lesson can double-up as a means of learning a new language and at the same time discovering new knowledge and perspectives.

Of course, the crux here is that the lessons have to contain things that students genuinely would spend time reading about in their spare time, rather than just being “interesting”. They should ideally provide students with new insights and perspectives that they have not met with before.

This is another example of the “two birds with one stone” factor. The English lesson can double-up as language learning time and a time of general intellectual enquiry.

There are a whole host of additional benefits to this way of learning, which I will cover in other articles.

3.       Enjoyment factor  

Finally, humans all want to have fun and feel joy.

With enjoyable lessons where students laugh and have fun, the ROI becomes immediate. The lessons are not just a means to an end, but are an end unto themselves. Some people pay for a Netflix subscription for entertainment. Why can't others get English lessons for the same reason?

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To be effective ESL teachers, we need to think of motivation in a fresh way, starting from first principles, understanding what motivation is, and working from there.