motivation part 1
TESL-EJ signed me up as a reviewer on a lengthy paper which I agreed to review recently. It deals with motivation amongst language learners. The reason they looked me up was because I had reviewed a book by Gardner a few years back. I guess that makes me a rational observer of the motivation research field.
Gardner, unrelated to the Gardner of multiple intelligences (as far as I know) had been the leader of motivation research for many years. He was living in French Canada, where there was a large number of people studying languages in both directions, and lots of despair over the process in general.
It's been standard in the language teaching business for many years that "motivation is everything" and "if you are motivated, you'll learn the language" regardless of any obstacles in your way. I didn't quite agree with any of this, or at least the sweeping generalization part of it, but there was no question, motivation is important. Gardner presided over a period of time when they tried to define kinds of motivation (such as
instrumental, for example - needing a language to use it for some other personal need, like studying engineering, as opposed to
integrative, actually wanting to be part of the culture you are seeking to communicate with). Finally, by the time he wrote the book I reviewed, he was quite frustrated with various
kinds of motivation, and he said, it doesn't
matter where it comes from, and it's impossible to divide or discern the kinds, as they get all confused anyway. What matters is the juice you get from them. If your motivation makes you go to class every day, then it's good motivation, and real. If it gets you to do your homework, it's real. But it doesn't matter if you
want to learn a language, but still can't get out of bed to go to class in the morning. If you aren't getting anything out of it, it's not real.
So Gardner goes on to say that if you're motivated you'll go to class, you'll like class, you'll do your homework, and you'll get out of bed in the morning. I may be misquoting him a little here, but he was saying something like that, and I was wondering, wait a minute, it's
possible to want to learn a language, and still be disillusioned enough about a given class, to not want to go to that class.
So what we're really arguing about is the process between, or the connection between, your deeper personal motivation, and your immediate problem, which is getting out of bed. And I realize that I've basically been studying that connection all of my life. It turns out that if you can get either of those kinds of motivations entwined in any way, you get extra benefit from doing it. It's kind of like being in the wake of a truck on an icy highway, and getting the benefit of not only having the truck break the wind, but also having him/her grind up the ice/snow on the road. It's hard to define how you get people to do the work that they should want to do anyway, but if the two motivations are connected in any way, you're going to be pulled along in the right direction. That's the essence of it.
Now the curious thing about the paper is that although someone named Dornyei is all over it (he/she has apparently written extensively on motivation), Gardner is nowhere to be seen. Is his work forgotten? Did he undo his own legacy by telling us what he did about motivation? I'm curious to find out.
Labels: grades, learning theory, motivation
What do you have to do to get an A around here?
Becker, H., Geer, B., and Hughes, E. (1968).
Making the Grade. New York: Wiley & Sons.
I didn't exactly read this book, but I liked its message and it's especially relevant to me because I've just finished my first full semester in an American classroom with a large (~40) group of bright American students, fully focused on their grade, who learned whatever they had to but mostly cared about the distinction between B- and A+, and what it took to get across that line.
In retrospect, the term went well, as I made sure they had to read the book or at least be very familiar with it, in order to get those grades, and they did, and were. At one point I tried to get them to do a linguistic experiment involving counting emoticons in their phone, and they wouldn't; one, however, asked if he could get extra credit for it. I often think of that as a difference between American egocentrism vs. international group-orientation (my international students would have done it in a minute, just for fun, or just on the power of my suggestion); thus, we were robbed of a source of data, or an opportunity to learn. Aside from that I had no regrets about the class; it was less interactive than I would have liked, but that was my own fault.
The book makes several points. One is that what students are doing here is collective behavior; they are all playing the same game and trading notes to some degree. Two, there is a significant amount of cheating associated with this process and the teachers are complicit not only in making classes cheatable (forgive me), but also putting significant energy into gearing up the war machine to prevent it. Finally, the whole system is a detriment to their real learning, since it is so geared to results and quantification.
Around the time the book was written student riots were at their peak (the book mentions Columbia and Berkeley) and in fact several schools abolished grades as a response, most significantly Antioch and UC-Santa Cruz (which has since reestablished them). Actually my knowledge of these no-grade systems is limited; I'd like to know how people at these institutions actually view this situation (Do students learn more? Are they happier? Has another system of good-eval-hunting come to replace grades?). I can say, however, that the effect is far greater at other institutions that have to deal with their students. One Antioch graduate had a hard time getting a scholarship (which he richly deserved) because his transcript was essentially held up by the fact that it didn't have grades on it. It's like not having a phone; it's fine for you, but it's an enormous hassle for people who you deal with.
Things have not changed that much since 1968, except for a few details. At SIUC, the distinction between B*, B and B- was lost, and virtually nobody in graduate classes or even in the upper level undergraduate ones got C or lower, so it was essentially a 2-grade system for much of academic life. People talk about there actually being 5 grades, but if, in essence, people don't give the bottom three, that's not saying much. And if B is the lowest grade, it becomes generally undesirable, a stain or a blot on one's record. In my time, B was still "better than average", so I fight my impulse to tell people, you should be proud of this; it means you did your work and learned a lot. I maintain the idea that "A" is "exceptional" and not just "better than average" or "did everything I asked him/her to". What I'm saying is that to some degree there are competing impressions of these grades as symbols, and some of the older impressions, somewhat anachronistic, may guide professors' minds, or even the students' minds, while the world to some degree has changed. I was happy, here, to have more choices; it seemed that I could make a statement with "A-" or "C+" that I couldn't make without the finer gradation; yet I also felt that we, collectively, were forced into a glass-bowl situation, in which the world would use these letters as their best interpretation of what students did and why they were there.
So what are the alternatives? I thought of one thing, but I'm still mulling over how it would work. That would be, to make all academia entrance-test oriented, so that what is learned in class would be
implicitly directed toward certain entrance tests, but not directly. Thus, in my linguistics class I would be free to teach whatever I wanted, with the implicit understanding that what I taught might appear on an
entrance test of some linguistics or anthropology graduate program, but would not otherwise be useful in any other way, since my own grade would be pass/fail, or no grade at all. Several questions would arise from this: 1) Doesn't the competitive drive to be better than one's peers actually motivate some learning; in other words, wouldn't students learn
less in this situation? 2) The echoes of graduate entrance exams would quickly and thoroughly saturate the system; I don't believe that's happening now with the GRE's, but my guess is that if that were
all there were things would be better, not worse; 3) it is not clear to me that an overhaul of the whole system has any political support whatsoever; Antioch has not succeeded in changing anyone, and therefore any innovation would be like a shout in the dark, and face problems that Antioch has in setting itself against the grain of American culture.
By that last part I am saying that basically, graduate schools, employers, and everyone else looks at those numbers (GPA, etc.) and says, here's a person who can compete with his/her mind, who gets up in the morning and does his/her job, who shows evidence of some learning and achievement. All of these assumptions are questionable to some degree, in any given particular case, given the cheating that occurs and other intangible factors, but it's the collective momentum of valuing these symbols that we're up against here, that any alternative system would have to be able to replace. These grades have
functions in modern society, and students, rebels that they are, may not like this system, but are maintaining it collectively anyway. I'm not sure that riots like those at Columbia or Berkeley would change anything at this point, and that's why I'm sure they are just gliding down the river of life, taking it as it comes, as unable to change the system as I am.
It makes one wonder: What other alternatives
have been proposed?
Labels: grades, learning theory
