M for MOTIVATION
Now, I am going to focus on the Word motivation, because I think this word have to be present every day in our life.
Now, I am going to focus on the Word motivation, because I think this word have to be present every day in our life.
The word motivation comes from the Latin verb “movere”
and this meaning “to move”, so I wonder, what encourage people to do something?
A definition for Motivation could be “concerns
the direction and magnitude of human behavior” (Teaching and Researching
Motivation, 2011, pg. 4). This explain why people make a choice to do something,
how long people decide to carry on with their own decisions and how many effort
they expend on it. (Teaching and Researching Motivation, 2011).
When you think about motivation is very
important to take into account two different types of it:
-
- Intrinsic motivationà that is, when people do something
because they feel pleasure and personal satisfaction with it. Also it could be
about enjoyment, interest, challenge and knowledge development.
With this kind of motivation people
encourage spontaneous learning behavior and it might be the most effective way
to learn or to know something. (Lessons from Good Language Learners, 2008).
- - Extrinsic motivation à that is, when people try to do
something for achieve another thing like getting a job or a good mark, avoiding
a punishment… Thus, we can considerer that it might be relate to extrinsic rewards
(Lessons from Good Language Learners, 2008).
Nevertheless, we can say that there is one more
type; it is called “Amotivation”.
This happens when people have to shortages of any kind of motivation (Teaching
and Researching Motivation, 2011).
When we think about this topic we have to be
careful, because is very common to confuse and connect motivation with “fun” or
“boredom”. In this way, we could consider motivation as a synonym of fun and an
antonym of boredom.
On the other hand, we should be in contact with
good learning, personal satisfying and go after challenge (Lessons from Good
Language Learners, 2008).
In which contexts could we find motivation? There
are lots of contexts where we could find this aspect in real life. I dare to
say motivation works day to day for different daily routines like going to
school, doing homework, playing, meeting with your friends and even to live.
Because of this, I think is essential in Primary
School classes and we have to focus on it in second languages subjects.
In Spain there are a lot of Bilingual schools
and in many cases children don’t know why they have to study this subject and they
don´t want to do it. But, what is the problem? Why children don’t want to study
this if it is the best for their future?
Maybe teachers aren´t enough prepared to teach in
this way and their students end up without desire to learn and probably with rejection
to the new knowledge.
Thus, I think if teachers were more motivated
to teach their students would be more motivated to learn.
To sum up, I would like to emphasize the importance of including motivation in our life and our class. It is essential for people and students to look forward to learn, if not the teacher has to generate this motivation because it would make easier the learning process.
REFERENCES:
Books:
- Griffith, c. 2008, Lessons from Good Language
Learners 2008. Cambridge University Press.
- Zoltán Dörnyei and Ema Ushioda, 2011, Teaching
and Researching Motivation. Applied Linguistics in Action Series.
