The New Brunswick Experiment - third post

In this third posting I want to look at the question of why people might learn a foreign language, and of the contexts in which that learning might take place. These are questions which school- teachers sometimes leave to one side, for the goals and even the methods are decided elsewhere, and we are often able to reduce our response to the question - which may be posed by the learners themselves - to the need to get good grades and to meet the expectations of employers. Powerful as these motivations might appear to be to us as adults, they are in direct competition with other, more pressing, pay-offs in the lives of children and adolescents.

Traditional SLA research has outlined two basic motivational modes towards FL learning ; these are integrative and instrumental. (I will not, here, enter into the distinction between motivation and orientation.) It was at one time held that the integrative orientation towards a language and its culture was more effective than the instrumental - however, subsequent research has thrown up several examples of efficient language learning powered by an instrumental outlook, including one in which Mexican women in California who did *not* like Anglos were more successful in learning English than were the women who reported that they liked them! This has lead to the idea that some learners are propelled by *Machiavellian Motivation*, or the desire to manipulate the speakers of the FL. (see the discussion in Ellis, pp. 508-17)

To my mind, the ambivalence of the results suggests that the initial categories may be of little interest. They appear to be vague and abstract, stripping the learner of her complexities and ambiguities as a human being, as a member of a given set of social groupings, within a given historico- social context. Within a school context, for example, it is quite evident that the attitudes and expectancies of both a child's parents, and of her peer group are crucial in determining her behaviour in class, and that the relationship between her and her teacher is also of considerable importance. These factors are not given, once and for all, but are dynamic - as any teacher knows, a child may be bright as a button one day, and dull as a stale doughnut the next - and most children would, if asked, say much the same thing about their teachers.

People actually find themselves in language classrooms for a great variety of reasons, most of which they are probably incapable of articulating. Research will throw up the integrative and instrumental patterns because these are indeed looked upon as valid reasons - that is to say, reasons that will put a stop to further probing, and allow us to get on with doing whatever it is that we are intent upon doing. (I am reminded here, if I may be permitted the anecdotal digression, of a student of mine. I was hired by his company to give him fifty hours tuition in English, and was told by the Personnel Officer, that my client was an accountant who would be needing the language so as to converse with visitors from New York. When I met him, he informed me that he would soon be taking an early retirement, that in fact he had no particular desire to learn English, but that all his peers had been given free lessons, which involved them leaving their busy offices for several hours, and he felt that it was his right to benefit from a similar arrangement). Over recent years, in the domain of teaching EFL to adults, the feeling has grown that this must be client-driven, and that in the final analysis, only the learner him or herself can determine the content of her learning. I would argue, however, that this is a misunderstanding of the basic role of the professional - like doctors, lawyers or accountants, we are often called upon to determine the clients needs, and even to tell him things that he would rather not hear.

The construction of motivation is a joint effort, undertaken by the learner, his entourage, and by the teacher and the school as a whole. For very young children, motivation needs to be rooted in the here and now - and this is still the case to a very large extent for adolescents and for adults. Now, it so happens that one of the basic human drives appears to be the drive to learn. Children want to learn about their world, and how to make it work - indeed, one of the reasons why children dislike school is because they often come to the conclusion that school teaches them far less and far more inefficiently than does the outside world. I would suggest that a teacher's principle role in the construction of motivation is to ensure that learning will actually take place, and to convince the learner that it has done so.

We will wish to interrogate Lightbown's study to know whether it can enlighten us upon how the children were motivated to learn in a context in which the teacher's activity was shorn of all pedagogical function

Timothy Mason

IUFM de Versailles

Post 4 is here.