Humanistic Teaching

An approach to learning English

The greater the loyalty of a group toward the group, the greater is the motivation among the members to achieve the goals of the group, and the greater the probability that the group will achieve its goals.

Rensis Likert

Motivation is a fire from within. If someone else tries to light that fire under you, chances are it will burn very briefly.

Stephen R. Covey

Your motivation? Your motivation is your pay packet on Friday. Now get on with it..

Noel Coward

What can motivate Japanese children to learn English? I mean, why should they bother? I remember complaining to my mother about learning French my first year in Secondary school. I couldn't see the point. I couldn't imagine any reason why I would need or want to speak French. Perhaps, if I had been getting a pay packet every Friday that could have been a reason, but I doubt it. It would have had to have been a big one. I never got a part-time job while I was at school. I felt paper rounds and the like to be exploitative. I valued my time more. In general, I resented school because there was so little there that held my interest. The only classes I liked were the ones that I made some kind of connection with the teacher. To a large extent, lesson content was irrelevant.

I've no idea whether my personal reaction to school is common. But I do think that emotional factors are a critical component of motivation. Take for example, the following list from a recent article in The Edurati Review, "Sailing The Seven  C's of Motivation"; that I came across the other day. Here it is with my own comments

1. Challenge - too little and students become bored, too much and they become anxious
2. Choice - this is empowering. Choice leads to "ownership" which leds to increased effort
3. Control - without this there can be no autonomy
4. Caring - how relevent is the material
5. Curiosity - engaging curiosity feeds caring
6. Competence - self-confidence springs from completing challenging tasks
7. Connectedness - humans are social animals and working together is generally more engaging

At the root of all the C's is student perception which I think is driven by emotion and in turn fuels motivation. Basically I think caring should be top of the list. If a student has no feeling about the material, there is little reason to care about it. It follows that is less likely that the student will be curious and when curiosity is weak choice and control are more likely to lead away from the material. Competence becomes less important as the challenge is essentially irrelevant. Students will make connects despite the material rather than through the material. The purpose of connections may even become to be critical of the material or in extreme cases to despise it.

As an example of my last point, my experience of a Post Graduate Diploma in Library And Information Studies springs to mind. I remember meeting every Friday afternoon in the canteen with a group to discuss how bad the course was. For some of us it became an exercise in working out how to do the absolute minimum and still pass. I remember one of the Course directors hauling me in half way through the course or so because of the amount of work I had missed. Ironically I was one of two elected student representatives. I knew I had calculated the passing criteria correctly. But whatever interest I may have had in pursuing a career in Librarianship was a casualty.

All this still begs the question of what we can do to get Japanese children to care about English? I know I have my own rough benchmarks for measuring motivation. Here are some:

• Do children request particular English activities?
• Do children give voluntary feedback about activities?
• Do children like a variety of English activities?
• Do they ask questions about English?
• Do they try to demonstrate what they know unprompted?
• Do they watch programmes in English on TV.
• Do they borrow English books?
• Do they ask for homework?
• Do they use English spontaneously with the teacher?
• Do they use English spontaneously with each other?

But what can we do to get children to care? More next week!

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