Intrinsic motivation and interest

Finding ways of arousing learner interest.

Fluctuations in learner interest

Rises and falls in learner interest. We can observe fluctuations of learners attention:

Place yourself somewhere where you have a good view of one or two particular students. Watch them carefully and notice fluctuations in their interest level; at the same time note what was going on in the classroom. I found this easiest to do by noting time, classroom event(s) and then ‘+ +’ for ‘high attention’, ‘− −’ for ‘very low attention’, or appropriate intermediate symbols. Your perception of when interest is rising or falling will be largely intuitive, but look particularly for the direction of the student’s gaze, slumping or erect body posture, alert or apathetic facial expression, physical activity that is, or is not, directed at the task in hand. When you have finished your observation, try to pinpoint some of the apparent causes of rises and falls in attention, and what you might learn from these for your own teaching. If others in your group have also done such observation, you might find it interesting to compare notes.

 

CLL, Suggestopedia

Community language Learning

CLL , founder Charles Arthur Curran (1960),  is language-teaching method in which students work together to develop what aspects of a language they would like to learn. It is based on the Counseling-approach in which the teacher acts as a counsellor and a paraphraser, while the learner is seen as a client and collaborator.

Advantages: CLL is an attempt to overcome the threatening affective factors in EFL and ESL. The teacher as a counselor allow the learners to determine type of conversation and to analyze the language inductively

The student centered nature of the method can provide extrinsic motivation and capitalize on intrinsic motivation.

Disadvantages: The counselor/teacher can become too non directive. Students often need directions.

The method relies completely on inductive learning, but it should be noted method of deduction is also important in FLL.

Translation is a complex and difficult task. The success of the method relies largely on the translation expertise of the counselor.

Suggestopedia

Founder Georgi Lozanov (1970), like Community Language Learning and the Silent Way Method, Suggestopedia is an innovative method that promises great effective language learning results. The name of Suggestopedia is from the words “suggestion” and “pedagogy.” It is a set of learning recommendations derived from Suggestology, which Lozanov describes as “a science … concerned with systematic study of the nonrational and/or non-conscience influences” that human beings are constantly responding to.

Advantages: Through Suggetopedia we learn to trust the power of the mind. We also learn that deliberately induced states of relaxation can be valuable at times in the classroom. We can also benefit from the use of music to get students sit back and relax.

Disadvantages: It is not a practical method as teachers face the problem of the availability of music and comfortable chairs. Author emphasizes the importance of memorization, excluding any reference to comprehension and creative problem solving. In fact language is not only about the power of the mind to memorize. It’s about understanding, interacting and producing novel utterances in different unpredictable situations.

Card 8

What is a syllabus?

The word syllabus derives from modern Latin syllabus "list", in Greek it means "parchment label, table of contents", which first occurred in a 15th-century. A syllabus is an outline and summary of topics to be covered in an education program or training course. It is descriptive (unlike the prescriptive or specific curriculum). A syllabus may be set out by an exam board or prepared by the professor who supervises or controls course quality.

 

( ADDITIONAL: A language teaching syllabus involves the integration of subject matter (what to talk about) and linguistic matter (how to talk about it); that is, the actual matter that makes up teaching. Choices of syllabi can range from the more or less purely linguistic, where the content of instruction is the grammatical and lexical forms of the language, to the purely semantic or informational, where the content of instruction is some skill or information and only incidentally the form of the language. To design a syllabus is to decide what gets taught and in what order. For this reason, the theory of language explicitly or implicitly underlying the language teaching method will play a major role in determining what syllabus is adopted. Theory of learning also plays an important part in determining the kind of syllabus used. For example, a syllabus based on the theory of learning espoused by cognitive code teaching would emphasize language forms and whatever explicit descriptive knowledge about those forms was presently available. A syllabus based on an acquisition theory of learning, however, would emphasize unanalyzed, though possibly carefully selected experiences of the new language in an appropriate variety of discourse types.

The choice of a syllabus is a major decision in language teaching, and it should be made as consciously and with as much information as possible. There has been much confusion over the years as to what different types of content are possible in language teaching syllabi and as to whether the differences are in syllabus or method. Several distinct types of language teaching syllabi exist, and these different types may be implemented in various teaching situations.)

 

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