Motivation: Pay it forward

“Motivational self-regulation, or self-motivation, is an intriguing new area within motivational psychology, exploring ways by which we can endow learners with appropriate knowledge and skills to motivate themselves.” Lamb (2004) Integrative motivation in a globalizing world. 3 (19)  52

In the same way that a person generally doesn’t play a sport for stakes (a competitive game) unless he also likes to play it for leisure, how can language learning stay in the realm of high stakes within a student’s mind and still be thought as being successful? The need for benchmarks and tests are great within a classroom; however, if that’s all that’s exchanged between L2 learners and their teachers, once the semester ends it is very likely (actually, almost 100% probable) that the students’ motivation to learn will cease also. All L2 educators’ task is difficult. Their task is to make a classroom with stakes (grades) somehow transcend this mental strata, sowing/ developing within students an intrinsic motivation as if there were no stakes, and instead, as if language learning were merely a hobby and an enjoyment.

This perfectly echoes my experience of growing to love reading. When I was a child, aside from mandatory school reading, I never cracked open a book. I was a child with much expression, emotion and creativity (all things that would seem to align to produce a reader), but I never enjoyed it. I remember peering to the left and right during SSR (silent sustained reading, or as we [the students] called it in elementary school, sit down, shut up and read. It was a time for quiet reading after lunchtime) and seeing my classmates, in particular my friends, turn over what seemed to be page upon page in their reading, while I barely had made it through line two. My anxiety was high, frustration present, and fibbing on my read page count log a daily occurrence. This developed my perception of reading that would follow me the next eight or nine years. My thought was, “I should like reading, but I just don’t. I’m not good at it and all my friends excel in it, and well, that’s it.” To add to the discouragement, I was a horrible, terrible, no good standardized test taker. Year by year I would score in the thirties on reading comprehension. The anxiety of the test was too much for me, and the pressure unbearable. Such daily and annual traumas painted a pretty bleak reading landscape within me.

Although I never consider my elementary experience a particularly high, high stakes atmosphere, it was enough to put me off. However, my faithful mother, a middle school English teacher, and an amazing one at that, read to me nightly before bed. I would never initiate it, but I always enjoyed when she did it. She would read books, poems, recipes, anything and everything to me. She would also have me read aloud to her. I was slow, I got frustrated, and embarrassed initially when I would make a mistake, but mom didn’t care if I made a mistake. It didn’t change her view of me, or her thoughts concerning my capacity to be a reader. We just read to read every night. Eventually, after beginning to enjoy listening to the rhythm of the words (they sound an awful lot like music sometimes) I would cut my mom off from her reading, grab the book from her and begin reading aloud myself. I couldn’t understand the material well when she read, but when I read I understood everything. It was at this time a seed of interest was sown.

However, this seed was dormant for another 4-5 years until the summer before 8^th grade, when the (yes) Harry Potter craze was gaining momentum. My aunt and uncle gave me the first three ‘years’ as a birthday gift and I was gearing up for a 12-hour drive to Portland, Oregon with my dad. What was I to do to pass the time in a pre i-Pod era? Read. I read it once on the way up, once on the way home and after that I never looked back. Whatever was sown into me in the years reading with my mom sprouted/ blossomed/ was set ablaze and I loved to read. I read and read and read all the way through my bachelors in English Literature.

Now, I suppose, how I transitioned into TESOL needs to be saved for another day.