Ema Ushioda: Socialising students’ motivation and autonomy in the English language classroom

Ema started her talk by underlining the centrality of internally-driven motivation to successful learning. However internalised, though, motivation is socially-formed, i.e. embedded in a certain social context. What she claimed was vitally important for learning is the need for motivation to come from within, not to be externally imposed on by social factors, although social factors are important in mediating the development of the internally-driven motivation.

It’s not always easy to cultivate intrinsic motivation during institutionalised learning, i.e. with the pressure of exams, uninspiring course books, etc. However, the external factors can be valuable: internalised extrinsic goals (e.g. medals for athletes, promotion for career-seekers, etc.) can serve as a stimulating force for the dynamic development of learners’ intrinstic motivation. What’s ultimately important is whether motivation is regulated from within or not, regardless of how external the learner’s final goal may be.

Motivational tricks and strategies, therefore, can not only promote teacher-dependent motivation in students, but they can also undermine their motivation from within. Teachers need to find ways of nurturing students’ intrinsic motivation. Providing something interesting for the learners is not enough – learning is not only fun. How can we make them do something they may not necessarily want to do (e.g. hard work), then?

To socialise their motivation from within, teachers should (in a very Vigotskian way) take into consideration the social environment in which learning is embedded. Although students have internal, general motivation, they still acquire the specific goals from the environment - e.g. the child learns what to want (Bronson, 2000). One way of practically acting upon this theoretical assumption was illustrated through references to Leni Dam’s professional practice. She forced the learners to be involved in making the classroom choices in terms of both planning and conducting the learning activities. Involving people in such important decision-making instils a sense of responsibility – critical in promoting motivational growth and self-regulation. Our task, as teachers, in this sense, would be to socialise our learners’ willingness to self-regulate.

In the second part of Ema’s talk, issues of learner identity were discussed. Reporting on Legenhausen’s (1999) study into the quality of the language produced by students taught traditionally and those given opportunities for exercising autonomy (it transpired that the former produced very unnatural and course-book-like language, as opposed to the latter, who produced more natural-sounding communication), she stressed the importance of teachers allowing students to behave as themselves and not only as learners engaging in pseudo communication. The implication for teaching seems to be that the teachers’ task is to motivate learners to ‘speak as themselves’, as fully-rounded persons, situated in a specific social context, who express their identity and allow it to evolve as they learn.

Ema then outlined the three types of identities theorised by Zimmerman (1998):
- situated identities (e.g. teacher, student, doctor…)
- discourse identities (listener, initiator…)
- transportable identities (e.g. mother of two, avid SF fan, Radiohead fan…)

pointing out Richards’ (2006) findings about the power of invoking the learners’ transportable (i.e. private) identities in which to embed their learning. Engaging the learners’ transportable identities and treating them as people, not only as learners, i.e. as ‘theoretical bundles of variables’, improves the likelihood, Ema maintained, of them becoming more motivated.

Ema wrapped up by emphasising the strong link between language identity and the self: “Who I am or want to be is also defined in terms of who I am not or do not want to become” (McCaslin, 2009).