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Learner-Drives in Second-Language Acquisition

Christopher F. Green

It is often assumed that motivational aspects of the second-language learning process are immutable phenomena-either conferred benefits or irksome constraints for the teacher. The general belief seems to be that students either enter the learning process motivated to learn or they do not, and that the consequences of this lottery have to be accepted and accommodated.

In this brief and preliminary article aimed at teachers of General English working with students at all post-primary levels, I want to suggest that learner motivation is actually in a constant state of flux brought about by a concatenation of developmental, personality, and attitudinal factors. This point alone means that the area is one of limitless richness and complexity. However, although motivation is a deeply personal impulse, it is possible to identify levels of motivation under which individualistic factors are largely subsumed. This is fortunate in that it enables us to discuss an essentially subjective topic in more general terms, and so identify ways in which pedagogic planning can take aspects of learner motivation into account.

Three main levels of motivation are readily identifiable. These are displayed below with their various definitions and drives. Needless to say, the levels are in constant parallel interaction.

HOLISM: THE WHOLE STUDENT APPROACH

Abraham Maslow’s pioneering work (1954) in presenting a unified hierarchy of individual needs that naturally motivate human behaviour was influential in Western education systems in the 1960s and early 1970s. Maslow’s hierarchy is constructed on the essentially Western notion that maximal ego-centred development is the goal of every individual. The hierarchy represents the individual’s progress in meeting needs and wants that range from the purely physiological to the highly creative, from survival to self-actualisation.

This explicit description of what is entailed in the process of “becoming whole” has helped teachers to perceive learners as constantly striving individuals, since at each level of attainment a new need is created, defined, and potentially limited to some extent by the degree of success achieved at the previous level. The developing and enquiring individual, then, is constantly in a state of what might be termed necessary and beneficial disequilibrium. I believe that the concept of learner disequilibrium has profound implications for teacher behaviour; these are elaborated as the discussion develops.

Maslow’s work, however, is of limited direct relevance to the language teacher; he makes no reference to the position a second language might occupy on the hierarchy of needs. Despite this we can guess with some confidence that the position is likely to depend heavily on the cultural and occupational context in which the individual finds himself. Maslow does, however, provide an important global, if semi-deterministic, view of the individual as a striving organism, a view that may help the teacher to be more aware of the student in whole-person terms rather than simply in his or her studial capacity.

THE CULTURAL-LINGUISTIC DIMENSION

At the level of the individual within and across cultures, the motivation to learn a foreign or second language has tended to be stated in dichotomous, either-or terms; that is, a learner is driven by either instrumental or integrative motivation (Gardner 1968 and 1979). Instrumental motivation is engendered and sustained by extrinsic forces such as job getting, promotion enhancement, or passing examinations, while the integrative type is generated intrinsically by positive perceptions of the target-language culture and its peoples. Gardner himself has stated unequivocally that integrative motivation provides the strongest, deepest, and most lasting drive to learn the target language. Perhaps the most important feature to note about learners motivated by instrumental ends is that they may take a dangerously short-term view of learning, resulting in fossilisation of key aspects of the target-language system and their communicative use. As Stevick noted (1982): “Apparently people acquire as much of a language as they really need for what they really want, but only that much.”

It is, nevertheless, surprising that the categories of instrumental and integrative motivation have been accepted as canons of linguistic law, since this dichotomy, like any other dichotomy, may be a useful contrasting device but can hardly hope to account accurately for the actual operations of such a multifaceted, elusive quality as motivation. Gardner’s research data originated from the bilingual situation in Montreal, and the close- proximity nature of this environment may have produced too strong an emphasis on integrative motivation for wider applicability. Porter Ladousse (1982) seems to support the notion that the integrative variety has little relevance other than to close-proximity environments.

In fact, the social context in which the second-language learning takes place may well be a very powerful constraint on the development of that language, in that the context provides the parameters of intranational identity and solidarity. It is clear, taking Hong Kong as an example, that close-proximity bilingual environments do not necessarily engender integrationist tendencies. Luke and Richards (1982) present a convincing case for regarding Hong Kong as essentially separatist in sociocultural terms, while Pierson and Fu’s (1982) findings point up an important linguistic consequence of this duality-that is, Hong Kong people’s negative perceptions of other local people who speak English in situations where the use of Chinese would be natural.

In sharp contrast to all this is the fact that in Hong Kong the level of instrumental motivation to learn English runs very high. Perceptions of English as low in status but high in utility set up a strong contradiction in the learner. He or she needs English to achieve success in terms of education and occupation, but at the same time the majority of Hong Kong people have strongly anti-integrationist tendencies. This attitude is manifested linguistically in the very high levels of virtually intractable fossilisation found in the English of many Hong Kong learners and users of English.

This kind of low affective drive is common to many contexts in which English is a foreign, rather than a second, language. There is, of course, little the teacher can do to change cultural-linguistic constraints speedily, although, as will be described later, these may be modified to some extent. Incidentally, it is interesting to note in passing that, in sharp contrast to English, French and Japanese in Hong Kong appear to enjoy high status but have relatively restricted utility at present. These positive perceptions are, perhaps, the result of admiration for particular facets of French and Japanese cultural-economic life: style and economic success, respectively.

The strongest strain of integrative motivation-drawing closer to or actually integrating into the target-language culture-seems, then, to be generally untenable. It is certainly difficult to conceive of a degree of own-culture alienation so great, or target-culture attraction so overwhelming, that an individual would wish to disown his own context of development completely, although some isolated instances of this do, of course, exist.

It is rather more likely, as indicated above, that specific features of the target-language culture may be admired or particularly valued by learners. Flavell (1984), for example, reported on the very considerable number of young Brazilian adults learning English to understand and possibly perform Anglo-American pop music. This particularist and narrowly focussed motivation is actually a very positive, and potentially expandable, phenomenon and once again indicates that, in reality, there is probably no sharp distinction to be made between instrumental and integrative modes of motivation. Interestingly, Burstall (1975) found that the two motivational drives by no means stand in mutual exclusion or contradiction, and that non-threatening and successful learning experiences develop positive attitudes to the target language, its people and culture that were not present at the start of the learning programme.

For the teacher this realisation is a crucial breakthrough because it promises a way in which positive attitudinal and instrumental drives might be linked to achieve optimal learning through combining extrinsic and intrinsic elements of motivation. In this way it might be possible to take the learner from limited perceived target-language needs to a positive desire to learn more about a culture through its language and so continually progress in the acquisition of the target language. This is not to say that the learner is likely to become integrationist in any strong sense, but low affective drive and the resulting high level of fossilisation might be prevented.

I want to suggest, then, that integrative motivation might best be redefined as a force potential in any environment conducive to second-language acquisition, while acknowledging that it could equally well be viewed in universal, nonlinguistic terms as the drive for acceptance and security to bring a sense of belonging to a particular community.

THE COGNITIVE-ACADEMIC DIMENSION

I use the term cognitive-academic to refer to the level of the individual in formal learning situations. This is naturally the level at which teachers are most directly concerned with questions of student motivation. Burstall’s findings (1975) strike an intuitive and positive chord for many teachers: that no matter how poorly motivated a learner may appear to be, the aware and sensitive teacher can actively develop strategies to generate, harness, and sustain a motivational dynamic not entirely directed towards instrumental ends. I want to propose an integrated five-point plan, one that as presented is not very elaborate but which should provide a practical framework for the enhancement of motivation in the second-language classroom.

Security and progress

My first point relates to the need for the teacher to create a low-anxiety atmosphere in the classroom and, at the same time, provide learners with a sense of making progress within the learning programme. This is of particular importance for learners with potentially inhibiting sociocultural backgrounds or personality types. Although there is little direct action the teacher can take to influence these factors, it is worth noting in passing that Pickett (1978) offers a description of the ideal background of a second-language learner, some features of which are: secure but nonrestrictive early rearing, no binding identification with a particular socioeconomic class, and no confining membership of an exclusive, monodialectal regional grouping. The good language learner, then, is open-minded and accepts cultural and linguistic variation with good grace and humour.

Krashen (1981) has absorbed the basic personality types of introvert and extrovert into his model of second-language acquisition, claiming that extroverts are more likely, because of their lack of inhibition, to communicate more effectively in the early stages of the second-language programme than their self-repressing introverted classmates. It is displayed schematically below:

More importantly, perhaps, Krashen has also emphasised the need to allow for a relatively silent, receptive period early in the second-language acquisition process. Part of the reason for this is to lower the affective barrier erected by many learners when presented with a form of learning that threatens individual identity. Allowing for an appropriate lag between reception and production of language has become one of the bedrock principles of communicative approaches to language teaching and, in the sense that this has reduced the use of audiolingual techniques demanding immediate oral responses, has proved to be reasonably successful in dismantling affective barriers. However, comprehensible input from the teacher and reception-based work for the student does not provide enough momentum to keep the learner optimally motivated. Output, and consequent feedback, are the means by which a learner becomes acquainted with his level of success. Successful learning experiences will tend to engender the desire for more success. It is in this way that the individual’s resolution to progress is strengthened.

The problem is that in large teacher-centred classes, students have little opportunity to deliver enough output to be judged fairly or receive constructive feedback to enhance feelings of security and success. Teachers, then, need to build approaches into the programme that do allow for substantial and significant output without threatening the learner with early and forced public production. Project and theme work, and activities utilising interactive techniques including the interactive noticeboard, intra- and inter-school English Days and visits, and the electronic mail system are clearly most likely to facilitate this. Swain (1990) describes the need for the teacher to “plan for opportunities for sustained language use by students where they are motivated to express faithfully and precisely their thought, and are provided with useful and consistent feedback.”

Comprehensible input from the teacher is of little use if students, through lack of language practice and use, are able only to produce virtually incomprehensible output, or at least language so marked by gross error that it has little international viability.

Substantial practice and feedback is not only essential to sustain motivation, but also to prevent fossilisation of erroneous target-language forms. The fossilisation potential of strongly communicative language-learning programmes has long been recognised. Canale and Swain (1979) acknowledge that a certain level of grammatical competence must be reached before strategic, communicative, and discourse competencies are able to play their vitally important roles in language use-that “what can be said determines what can be meant.” More recently, Major (1988) linked the effects of fossilised language to studies investigating perceptions of the relative gravity of errors and concluded:

There is a significant difference between a listener who merely understood the [inaccurately formulated] message and was unaffected, one that understood but was annoyed in the process, and one who understood and was sympathetic. In all three situations the basic message may be the same, but the total meaning and impact are different.

Providing opportunities for increased practice could be facilitated by the use of self-directed (self-access) learning materials, particularly for listening, reading, and writing. After all, the ultimate objective of self-access systems is maximum individualisation of learning. This personalisation of the learning process must enhance motivation, provided regular review sessions with teachers and peers are built into the programme to maintain internal dynamism and counterbalance the social isolation inherent in self-access systems. For speaking, I would advocate regular recording, promptly followed by monitoring (with the teacher) of speech samples for the learner to detect progress and repair problems effectively.

Involvement in the learning programme

The learner needs to be able to perceive that there are real purposes and benefits to be derived from learning a second language and that the learning programme is appropriately focussed and internally dynamic. Only through such perceptions are learners likely to feel involved fully in the learning process.

It is rather surprising, then, that although teachers may well know what they are doing, why they are doing it, and where they are going, the students usually do not. It is a truism that school-level students remain largely unaware of the reasoning and goals, other than examination-passing, underlying the second-language learning programme. The learners are left bereft of a purpose to learn and of the directions that learning will take. The fact that the learners in question are often relatively young is no reason for keeping them unenlightened.

To promote participative learning, I suggest that the teacher could interview, possibly in the mother tongue, at least a representative cross-section of students before the start of the learning programme to gauge the approximate nature and range of learner interests. These interests could then be fed into the programme as projects, topics, or themes. The programme might then be perceived as taking account of student needs and wants. This kind of activity on the part of the teacher must have beneficial effects in generating and sustaining learner motivation.

The suggestion here implies a move towards more learner-centred (almost client-centred) approaches to teaching. A co-occurring de-emphasising of prescribed study areas and of the set textbook in favour of relevant tasks and activities located or created by individual teachers is also implied. I am not, of course, suggesting a radical and sudden change to a negotiated procedural syllabus, but a limited number of student suggestions could be easily accommodated within most school-based learning programmes.

Keeping the learner informed in order to keep him motivated does not stop at this point. It needs to be seen as a continuous process. For example, a student version of both medium- and longer-term teaching plans could be produced and referred to at regular intervals to let students see clearly just where they are, what is to be tackled next, and why.

The teacher might also consider spending a few minutes at the beginning of each lesson (or just the first of the week’s lessons if time is very short) sketching a very brief overview of the lesson or lessons on the board. Time elements might be included if this is felt to be useful. Again, this would allow students to see the direction of their learning and may well enhance motivation to achieve clear-cut ends within a certain time scale. To communicate these details effectively, the teacher will need to conceive and phrase lesson objectives in terms of learner behaviour-an empathetic process in itself.

Involving the learner in the global teaching and learning process is of the greatest possible importance, since language, as a subject per se, is rarely enough to motivate learners to any significant extent. It is not surprising, for instance, that Munby (reported in Porter Ladousse) recorded a drastic decrease in motivation among African students when English was introduced as a subject rather than being used as the medium of instruction for the delivery of science subjects, a genuinely communicational use of the target language.

Cognitive engagement

There is no such thing as a learner completely uninterested in each and every aspect of learning a second language. An interest (in the sense of psychological arousal) will exist, albeit slight and covert, as a natural consequence of exposure to the language and aspects of its culture. The teacher’s task is to bring this level of arousal to maximum pitch. This all seems obvious enough, but it is sometimes forgotten in the teaching process. Arousal will not be maximally effected, for example, by the provision of a very brief “motivation” section early in the lesson in which pictures or realia might be used to stimulate interest in the whole lesson. This kind of procedure reflects a clear use of Stimulus-Response models of learning based on relatively unrefined behaviourist psychology. Motivation is regarded here as a short-range force designed to operate over the span of the single lesson as a necessary condition for the achievement of prescribed, and equally short-range, behavioural objectives. Such procedures keep the content of the learning process distant from the learner and make little allowance for engaging his active cognitive participation in the process. Cognitive engagement in the learning process must be seen as inextricably linked to motivation. Ausubel (1968) expressed this concisely:

The most appropriate way of arousing motivation to learn is to focus on the cognitive rather than the motivational aspects of learning, and to rely on the motivation that is developed from successful educational achievement to energise further learning.

Learner curiosity is perhaps best aroused by using the appeal of those aspects of the target language that meet the developmental interests of a particular group of learners. Staging the lesson, or activities within it, so that pre, while, and post phases occur should help to maximise motivation to learn through engaging learners in a primarily cognitive process: the pre stage to utilise existing knowledge on the topic of study and raise expectations, the while stage to provide a purposeful means of confirming or disconfirming those expectations and to provide guidance in processing input, the post stage to build on what has been learned and provide a sense of completion to the whole process. Clearly, the use of tasks and activities based on the principles of problem-solving are likely to be most effective in engaging the learner’s cognitive machinery fully.

Channels of exposure to the target language and its peoples and culture are, of course, important in maximising the cognitive engagement of the learner and in maintaining the beneficial disequilibrium required to keep the learner wanting to learn more. Authentic print and video materials provide the best channels of exposure, since they naturally embody aspects of the target-language culture. The corollary of this applies, too: that learners are made much more aware of their own culture by learning about foreign ones. It hardly needs to be reiterated that even this kind of exposure will fail if the topic presented is not made interesting and appropriate for the developmental level of particular learners.

Incentive to sustain impetus

The long-term and comparatively urgency-free nature of many general-purpose language courses is a major hindrance to the maintenance of genuine, enquiry-driven momentum in the classroom. For this reason, there is a need for the teacher to build into teaching plans and schemes of work a set of learning aims or targets to connect and relate particular lesson objectives. Single-lesson behavioural objectives are aimed at mastery of certain items of language within a set time frame. While a sense of having mastered particular items of language is of some importance-the learner can claim linguistic payoffs at regular intervals-this is not as important as encouraging the learner to regard mastered objectives as simply part of a larger and more purposeful set of targets that is always proximal and in view (targets must not be dishearteningly difficult or insultingly easy to attain) but which is never completely achieved. In this way one of the major outcomes of all educational initiatives might be achieved: the development of the efficient, independent, self- directed learner competent in organising his own learning long after programmes of formal instruction have ceased.

This kind of broad programmatic planning implies a move away from behaviouristic teaching approaches and techniques. Pre-set targets simply provide a structured and secure frame for demonstrating implicitly the continuing, long-term nature of learning, while lesson objectives offer shorter-term points of reference against which the students may evaluate their progress in a positive light. In keeping with Burstall’s findings, this should help to ensure positive perceptions of target-language phenomena and help sustain the learning process. Learning targets harness learner disequilibrium in a positive way by sustaining the desire to learn more, even when set objectives appear to have been achieved.

Perception of language unity

In the present context, unity relates to the need for learners to grasp that each language item studied, each area of language use covered, is a successful step towards achieving higher and ever more enriching ends. The clear implication for the teacher here is not simply to teach, practise, test, and abandon language items, but to constantly recycle them-for example, in the guise of problem-solving tasks that offer use-based and integrated combinatorial practice. Learning thus becomes a spiralling rather than a linear process. The point here clearly is that integration of language parts and of language and its uses is best fostered by a holistic syllabus and its derived methodology, rather than a synthetic approach in which language items are taught discretely, requiring the learner to reintegrate these items as a prior condition to their communicative use. As most teachers know only too well, overproduction of the discrete items is a far more likely consequence of the synthetic approach than integration.

I would contend that the teaching and learning programme centred largely on problem-solving and task-based approaches to using language is the most likely to engage the learner’s cognitive machinery in an active, participatory way. Pedagogic lesson objectives may be thought out and phrased in a variety of ways-lexicostructural, functional, notional, or a combination of these-but real-world application and use is what most learners are interested in, and this needs to be taken into account by the teacher. The problem is that many school-level learners often cannot envisage such real-world applications. Product-focussed objectives will then become less important than process-oriented ones that are based rather more on classroom tasks and activities than on learning outcomes or products. This, of course, with the proviso that students receive enough feedback on the degree of cognitive and linguistic success achieved in the particular task.

AFTERWORD

This article has taken a broad, generalised, and, I hope, balanced view of motivation. This is necessary if anything at all meaningful is to be recommended to teachers who, in many international contexts, are constrained by large classes and pedagogic traditions of teacher-centred approaches to learning. For this reason individualistic factors, for example, have been de-emphasised in the foregoing discussion. That said, no matter how comprehensive and successful the teacher’s motivation-enhancement plans, certain students will, of course, travel further along the learning continuum than others. The degree of success must to some extent be determined by uncontrollable cultural, individualistic, and socioeconomic factors. The teacher can, nevertheless, help to provide the impetus for the learner to achieve all that he or she is capable of achieving in this particular field of intellectual endeavour.

References

Ausubel, D. P. 1968. Educational psychology: A cognitive view. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Burstall, C. 1975. Factors affecting foreign- language learning: A consideration of some recent research findings. Language Teaching and Linguistics: Abstract, 8, 1.

Canale, M. and M. Swain. 1979. Communicative approaches to second language teaching and testing. Review and Evaluation Bulletin, 1, 5.

Flavell, R. 1984. Aspects of motivation in second language learning. Paper read at the Second Colloquium of the E.S.O.L. Department, University of London Institute of Education.

Gardner, R. C. 1968. Attitudes and motivation: Their role in second-language acquisition. TESOL Quarterly, 2, 3.

---. 1979. Social psychology aspects of second-language acquisition. In Language and social psychology, ed. H. Giles and R. N. St. Clair. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Krashen, S. D. 1981. Second language acquisition and second language learning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Luke, K. K. and J. C. Richards. 1982. English in Hong Kong: Functions and status. English World-Wide, 3, 1.

Major, R. C. 1988. Balancing form and function. IRAL, 26, 2.

Maslow, A. H. 1954. Motivation and personality. New York: Harper.

Pickett, G. D. 1978. The foreign language learning process. The British Council E.T.I.C. Publication.

Pierson, H. D. and G. S. Fu. 1982. Report on the linguistic attitudes project in Hong Kong and its relevance for second language instruction. Language Learning and Communication, 1, 2.

Porter Ladousse, G. 1982. From needs to wants: Motivation and the language learner. System, 10, 2.

Stevick, E. W. 1982. Teaching and learning languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Swain, M. 1990. The immersion experience in Canada: Is it relevant to Hong Kong? Plenary paper presented at the ILE’s Sixth International Conference, Hong Kong.

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