A Reader Responds to Guilloteaux and Dornyei’s “Motivating Language Learners: A Classroom- Oriented Investigation of the Effects of Motivational Strategies on Student Motivation”

A Reader Responds to Guilloteaux and Dörnyei’s “Motivating Language Learners: A Classroom-Oriented Investigation of the Effects of Motivational Strategies on Student Motivation” ROD

THE FORUM

TESOL Quarterly invites commentary on current trends or practices in the TESOL

profession It also welcomes responses and rebuttals to any articles or remarks

published here in the Forum or elsewhere in the Quarterly.

A Reader Responds to Guilloteaux and Dörnyei’s

“Motivating Language Learners: A

Classroom-Oriented Investigation of the Effects of Motivational Strategies on Student Motivation”

ROD ELLIS

University of Auckland

Auckland, New Zealand

䡲 There is a wealth of literature examining the role of motivation in second language (L2) learning but remarkably little research that has examined how teachers can foster motivation in the classroom For this reason alone Guilloteaux and Dörnyei’s (2008) correlational study of the relationship between motivational strategies and student motivation in junior high school classrooms in Korea is to be wel-comed This study constitutes an important development in research

on motivation and I anticipate that it will be followed by many other studies

The design of the study involved (a) selecting specifi c classroom stu-dent behaviors hypothesized to be indicative of motivation and (b) cor-relating measures of these with measures of teachers’ motivational practice This study is clearly exploratory but also eminently sensible given that we have very little empirical evidence on which to base selec-tion of either (a) or (b) I am going to focus my comments on (a), learners’ motivated behavior

The three student variables selected for investigation were attention, participation, and volunteering for teacher-fronted activity Guilloteaux and Dörnyei (2008, see Table 1, p 62) provide brief descriptions of the three variables What is missing, however, is an account of why these spe-cifi c behaviors are considered to demonstrate motivation It would seem

to me quite crucial to provide a theoretical rationale for the choice of these variables

There is a rich literature on attention in SLA Emphasizing the

impor-tance of attention in language learning, Schmidt (2001) wrote:

The concept of attention is necessary in order to understand virtually

every aspect of second language acquisition, including the development

of interlanguages (ILs) over time, variation within IL at particular points

in time, the development of L2 fl uency, the role of individual differences,

such as motivation, aptitude, and learning strategies in L2 learning, and

the ways in which negotiation for meaning, and all forms of instruction

contribute to language learning (p 3)

However, the kind of attention that Schmidt has in mind is the mental

noticing that learners’ engage in when confronted with L2 input That is,

it is a psycholinguistic construct, not a behavioral one More useful for

Guilloteaux and Dörnyei’s purpose, perhaps, is Tomlin and Villa’s (1994)

model of attention They distinguished three kinds of attentional

processes: (a) alertness, which involves a general readiness to deal with

incoming stimuli and is closely related to the learner’s affective or

moti-vational state; (b) orientation, which entails the aligning of attention on

some specifi c type or class of sensory information at the expense of

others; and (c) detection, when the cognitive registration of a sensory

stimu lus takes place It would seem that what Guilloteaux and Dörnyei

have in mind is alertness I would like to suggest, therefore, that this is a

much better term than attention It needs to be borne in mind, however,

that alertness does not tell us what the students are orienting to (form or

meaning?) nor whether detection (i.e., noticing of linguistic features)

takes place At best, then, we might expect only a weak correlation

between attention and learning What is arguably important is whether

teachers can motivate students not just to be alert but also to orientate to

form (at least sometimes) and to detect form–meaning mappings in the

input However, probably all that can actually be observed in a classroom

is alertness

Guilloteaux and Dörnyei’s second student motivated behavior is

par-ticipation This is considered to be evident when “students are actively

taking part in classroom interaction or working on assigned activity”

(p 62) A fi rst problem is that this variable confounds two very different

phenomena: oral participation in the classroom and concentrated effort

on an individual assignment It would surely be better to distinguish

these I know of no work in L2 classroom research that has examined

how students engage with independent classroom assignments, so I will

not comment on this However, there is a considerable body of work that

has examined oral participation in the classroom Presumably, the choice

of this variable was informed by the assumption that the more students

participate in the classroom, the more they will learn However, there

is in fact very slender evidence to suggest that sheer quantity of parti-cipation in the classroom benefi ts language learning In Ellis (2008)

I reviewed the research that has examined the relationship between quantity of oral participation and language learning The results are very mixed Seliger (1977), Naiman, Fröhlich, Stern, and Todesco (1978), and Strong (1983) reported positive correlations between various mea-sures of learner participation and profi ciency Day (1984), in a careful replication of Seliger’s study, to a large extent Ely (1986), and, more recently, Delaney (2008) found no such relationship Allwright (1980) also found that the learner who participated the most in the lesson he analysed was not among those who showed the greatest advances In short, there is no convincing empirical basis for claiming that sheer quantity of participation is benefi cial for learning There is much better support for the claim that qualitative aspects of participation are condu-cive to learning (see, e.g., Ellis, 1999; Delaney, 2008) Qualitative aspects include such behaviors as students asking questions, repeating what the teacher or another student has said, preempting attention to form, and taking risks by using complex language Arguably, then, what we need

to know is what motivates students to participate with these qualita-tive behaviors rather than focusing just on the quantitaqualita-tive aspect of participation

Guilloteaux and Dörnyei’s third student motivated behavior is

volunteering for teacher-fronted activity The descriptor of this variable

(“At least one third of the students are volunteering without the teacher having to coax them in any way,” p 62) suggests that it seems to

con-cern what is known as self-selection in classroom process studies This

was among the behaviors that van Lier (1988) identifi ed as potentially important for learning Van Lier noted that in the L2 classroom data he collected, the learners frequently did self-select and suggested that such opportunities are valuable because they cater to experimen-tation with language, which is at the cutting edge of their linguistic development This variable, then, appears to have at least some support

in the SLA literature But I did fi nd myself wondering how it could

be distinguished from the second motivated behavior, participation Self-selection is perhaps best considered one aspect of qualitative participation

In presenting the results of their study, Guilloteaux and Dörnyei com-puted a composite measure of learners’ motivated behavior, reporting an

impressive correlation of r = 0.061 ( p < 0.001) with teacher’s motivational practice 1 It might be argued then that my doubts concerning the validity

1 It would have been helpful to see the separate correlations between the three motivated behavior variables and teachers’ motivational practice

of their measures of learners’ motivated behavior are misplaced However,

what this correlation shows is simply a relationship between how the

stu-dents behaved and the teachers’ motivational strategies As Guilloteaux

and Dörnyei take care to point out, it does not tell us whether the

moti-vated behavior of the students was related to language learning The basic

model that underlies their study is

Teachers’ motivational practice → students’ motivated behavior → L2

learning

What is really needed, then, is a theoretical and empirical basis for

deter-mining which aspects of students’ motivated behavior are predictive

of L2 learning It is this piece that is missing from Guilloteaux and

Dörnyei’s study

That said, I found this a very interesting study, one that certainly moves

research of L2 motivation forward by making the link between what

teachers do and students’ intrinsic motivation, and one that I will use in

my own teaching in graduate-level courses for language teachers

THE AUTHOR

Rod Ellis is a professor in the Department of Applied Language Studies and

Linguistics, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand, and a visiting professor

at Shanghai International Studies University, Shanghai, China His published work

includes articles and books in second language acquisition and language teaching,

and several English language textbooks In addition to his current position in New

Zealand, he has worked in schools in Spain and Zambia and in universities in the

United Kingdom, Japan, and the United States He is also the editor of the journal

Language Teaching Research

REFERENCES

Allwright, R (1980) Turns, topics and tasks: Patterns of participation in language

teaching and learning In D Larsen-Freeman (Ed.), Discourse analysis in second

lan-guage research (pp 188–198) Rowley, MA: Newbury House

Day, R (1984) Student participation in the ESL classroom, or some imperfections of

practice Language Learning, 34, 69–102

Delaney, T (2008) Individual differences, participation, and language acquisition in

communicative EFL classes in a Japanese university Unpublished doctoral

disser-tation, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

Ellis, R (1999) Learning a second language through interaction Amsterdam: John

Benjamin

Ellis, R (2008) The study of second language acquisition (2nd Ed ) Oxford: Oxford

University Press

Ely, C (1986) An analysis of discomfort, risktaking, sociability, and motivation in the

L2 classroom Language Learning, 36, 1–25

Guilloteaux, M., & Dörnyei, Z (2008) Motivating language learners: A classroom-oriented investigation of the effects of motivational strategies on student

motiva-tion TESOL Quarterly, 42, 55–77

Naiman, N., Fröhlich, M., Stern, H., & Todesco, A (1978) The good language learner

(Research in Education Series No 7) Toronto, Ontario, Canada: University of Toronto, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education Reprinted in 1996 by Multilingual Matters

Schmidt, R (2001) Attention In P Robinson (Ed.), Cognition and second language

instruction (pp 3–32) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Seliger, H (1977) Does practice make perfect? A study of the interaction patterns

and L2 competence Language Learning, 27, 263–278

Strong, M (1983) Social styles and second language acquisition of Spanish-speaking

kindergarteners TESOL Quarterly, 17, 241–258

Tomlin, R., & Villa, V (1994) Attention in cognitive science and second language

acquisition Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 16, 183–203

Van Lier, L (1988) The classroom and the language learner London: Longman