PHAM KHAC THOI - LIT REVIEW

The research into motivational measures is a major contributing factor to facilitating teachers in engaging their students in their lessons, creating a comfortable and active classroom a

THE EFFECTIVENESS OF MOTIVATIONAL STRATEGIES IN L2

TEACHING INTRODUCTION

One of the subjects that have attracted the most effort and time budget of celebrated linguists in the past decades is motivation This umbrella term refers to the causes and origins of actions (Dornyei, 2001) According to Ur (2012), motivation is divided into five categories, including integrative motivation which urges learners to fit in an English-speaking community; instrumental motivation which pushes learners through the learning

process in order to gain educational or material benefits; extrinsic

motivation which mentions the effects that success and failure have on learners; intrinsic motivation and self and personal identity It is generally believed that engaging students into lessons is the key determinant of academic success or failure (Dornyei, 2001) In a research study, Dornyei and Guilloteaux (2007) stated that motivation is a considerable

contributor to the initiation and maintenance of the second language learning process Because of its vital role in second language acquisition, motivation has been the subject of numerous recent studies in the field of linguistics

A retrospective look at the development of motivation reveals that

traditionally, researchers paid much more attention to how to define this term It was not until the 1990s that preliminary research was carried out

to examine how motivation could be applied in the classroom setting This gave rise to the emergence of the significance of motivational strategies According to Dornyei (2001), these are “techniques that promote the individual’s goal related behavior” (p.?) and “influences that help learners

to achieve some systematic and enduring positive effects” (p?) The

research into motivational measures is a major contributing factor to facilitating teachers in engaging their students in their lessons, creating a comfortable and active classroom atmosphere and thus creating more productive teaching

This literature review is organized in the following procedures First,

background information on motivation and motivational strategies is presented, followed by the framework and the perspectives from which motivational strategies were viewed After that, the most effective

practices withdrawn from different studies are compared and contrasted Following this is a discussion of major methodological issues Finally, implications for future research and education are mentioned

METHOD

Right from the beginning, it happened to me that a clear method of

searching for materials was of vital importance in the process of writing a literature review, so a great deal of thought was put on it The first

consideration would be the topic of research, which has been stated at the beginning of the literature as motivational strategies in L2 teaching My adoption of the topic could be justified by my interest and its significance

in my field Having identified the topic, I moved on to the searching phase

To serve the searching purpose, a list of key words was created, including motivation, motivational strategies in L2 teaching, motivational practices

by teachers and motivational strategies from different perspectives

These phrases were then typed into scholar.google.com, which is one of the most reliable search engines when it comes to looking for

authoritative academic texts Sciencedirect.com is another high-quality option Because thousands of results were displayed, a set of criteria, whose components were the prestige, the relevance and the time of

publication The reputation of the author, the journal and the article was were? easily checked by respectively reading their biographies, going to scimagojr.com and checking the frequency of citation in other works

To investigate whether an article was topic-related, the abstract was

carefully examined Regarding the time of publication, those articles

published within the last five years were prioritized Having taken several inclusion and exclusion criteria into account, I selected four articles which best met my requirements to serve as the materials for this literature review

OVERVIEWS OF ARTICLES

The first article that I decided to investigate is the work byThe first article reviewed is the one by Dornyei and Guilloteaux (2008) One of the urges

to choose this article is that one of the two authors, Dornyei, is a world-celebrated psycholinguist whose renowned works focus on motivation in second language learning In their study, they tried to examine the relationship between the students’ level of motivation reported by themselves, how they behaved in the classroom and teachers’ motivational practices Also, they aimed to explore how influential teacher’s motivational measures were to students’ motivation The site of the study was 20 coed and single sex junior high schools in South Korea,

whose 1,381 students took part in the two-phase research The study made use of three instruments, one of which was the MOLT Classroom Observation Scheme, which was used to assess students’ level of engagement in the classroom activities in terms of attention, participation and volunteering; and included 25 teachers’ motivational behaviors A 20-item questionnaire was also distributed to each participant and a post-lesson teacher evaluation scale was immediately completed after each lesson by teachers After all the instruments had been available, the study was conducted through two stages Firstly, a piloting was conducted to test and modify the three instruments in terms of wording, clarity and accuracy This is followed by the main study which took place during the course of 2 last months of the first semester of the 2003-2004 academic year Before each of the 40 classes involved in the study started, questionnaires were delivered to students, followed by minute-by-minute written records of classroom activities, and the process culminated in the completion of the teacher evaluation scale after every lesson Once the data have been analyzed, the author came to the following findings Firstly, teachers’ motivational practices during class strongly affect student’s motivated behaviors Another finding is that students’ self-reported motivation somehow influence their in-class motivated behaviors Thirdly, teachers’ motivational practices influence the general appreciation of the whole course

It is obvious that there exists a relationship between the study’s findings and the topic of this literature review As can be seen from the findings of the study, the motivational strategies applied by teachers during their

lessons positively influence students’ attitudes towards the lessons and the whole learning process In other words, the study confirms the effectiveness of teachers’ behaviors when it comes to engaging students

in the lessons as well as the entire course

Another study was carried out by Olmezer Ozturk and Ok (2014), seeking to identify the most and the least effective motivational measures performed by teachers from students’ perspectives All tThe 314 pre-intermediate EFL students involved in their study came from a Turkish state university, and they were 17-to-22–year–olds The instruments used in the study consisted of two-part questionnaires and interviews The first part of the former was designed to obtain demographic about the participants while the second part contained 62 teachers’ motivating behaviors suggested from students’ answers to the open-ended questions administered to them at the beginning of the term, consultation with co-workers and some prestigious works and a piloting period To achieve deeper insight and enhance validity and reliability, the author held interviews with 19 students who had been informed of the questions in advance After the process of data collection and analysis, the authors reported some findings Firstly, a glance at the results from the questionnaires and the interviews reveals that the presence of a smile on the face and offering intervals during class is hailed as the most engaging activity from the eyes of students Meanwhile, the interviews and questionnaires bear inconsistent results, with the overwhelming use of English and the attachment of too much significance to seating arrangement being recorded as the two least motivating behaviors according to the

questionnaires; and the frequent administering of homework and the preliminary clarifying of objectives at the beginning of the lesson being reported as exerting the least effect on students’ motivational level

The results of the study to some extent shed light on the topic The researchers made an attempt to clarify the effectiveness of 62 motivational items from the students’ view, and the findings were satisfying in that they provided the items with the most and the least motivational influences on students

The third article to be included in this literature review is the work by Wong (2013), investigating the frequency of use of several motivational items in the Chinese context and measuring the effectiveness of these practices from the view of teachers, students and researchers The study obtained the participation of roughly 900 students and 80 teachers of theirs whose ages ranged from mid twenties to late forties and whose years of experience ranged from 3 to 26 They all came from Years 7-9 in five normal secondary schools in Hong Kong The research made use of five instruments, namely the teacher motivational strategies questionnaires designed to outline the frequency of certain motivational practices employed; the pre-project teacher interviews to gain further explanations as to the reasons for their use of certain motivational strategies; the Motivational Strategies Effectiveness (MSE) observation scheme wherein the author observed classes and made assessment on the leaners’ motivated behaviors and the effectiveness of 25 motivational behaviors derived from the above-mentioned questionnaires and interviews; the student motivation questionnaires designed to examine

the effectiveness of teachers’ situational motivational strategies from the learners’ perspectives; and teacher post-lesson evaluation scales which were immediately completed after each class by teachers to give them a chance to reflect on the effectiveness of their own motivational behaviors Once all the instruments had been available, the study was carried out in five phases In the first step, motivational strategies were identified from questionnaires and interviews with teachers This was followed by a piloting of the MSE observation scheme The study was then proceeded with lesson observations, wherein the author investigated the effectiveness of motivational strategies employed by the teacher, and so did the students and the teacher by filling in questionnaires The same procedures were carried out in the fourth stage after one month and in the fifth stage within two months after the fourth After the whole process came to an end, the data were collected, analyzed and yielded some results corresponding to the research questions Firstly, regarding the frequency of motivational behaviors, the top five most commonly used ones were: (1) delivering rewards; (2) giving tasks to small groups; (3) exhibiting and promoting humor; (4) changing seating arrangement; (5) providing students with enough preparation and support Secondly, in terms of the effectiveness of motivational strategies as a whole, they were most effective to teachers, not as effective to researchers and the least effective to students Finally, students and teachers reached a consensus that reward-giving was the most effective teacher-originated behavior while the researcher ranked it second only to the practice of making sure that students receive enough preparation and assistance

These findings by Wong (2013) firmly establishes the common ground between this article and the overall topic of this literature review While the topic refers to how effective some motivational activities are in the classroom setting, Wong pointed out that the most influential teacher-originated behavior is reward-delivering in the view of teachers and students and the certainty that students receive enough support and preparation in the author’s perspective

The last article to be reviewed is the one by Cheng and Dornyei (2007), which has been cited as framework of many studies in the field The study described in the article was carried out with a view to examining the importance and frequency of certain motivational strategies and the possible relationship between them in the Taiwanese context In this study, the diversity of the participants was greatly enhanced by the involvement of 387 teachers whose genders are male, female and unidentified, and whose teaching sites ranged from elementary schools to universities in various parts of Taiwan Their instructional experience and educational background were also varied While a small minority of participating teachers had less than one year’s experience, nearly half of them had been teaching for more than 20 years It is also noticeable that one quarter of them had previously experienced overseas study The study made use of two instruments, both of which were self-reported questionnaires and contained 48 motivational items These items were short-listed from more than 100 strategies proposed by Dornyei (2001) after a piloting period with the participation of 19 English teachers and were categorized into ten clusters During the study, questionnaires were

sent to participants by mail and the response rate was high After receiving responses, the authors went on to analyze the data and then produced the results to the research questions put forward Firstly, the study revealed that appropriate teacher’s behaviors are at the top of the list of importance, followed by the recognition of students’ effort and success Meanwhile, the arousing of learner’s self-confidence is in the third place and the promotion of learner’s autonomy was the least important These first three clusters mentioned above are also the most widely used by teachers With regards to the relationship between the importance and frequency, the study found that making the learning tasks stimulating is the most underused when compared with its level of importance

There is a firm connection between the findings of this article with the topic of the literature review The article attempted to rank the teacher’s motivational behaviors according to their level of importance In other words, the effectiveness of these practices were measured, which exactly matches with the general topic of this writing

DISCUSSION OF ARTICLES

MOTIVATION AND MOTIVATIONAL STRATEGIES

When it comes to the role of motivation in L2 teaching and learning, the four articles seem to find some common ground It is generally suggested that motivation plays a crucial role in improving classroom atmosphere, boosting the students’ morale and thus enhancing their academic performance This importance was raised in Guilloteaux and Dornyei (2008), wherein they likened motivation to the primary impetus to

generate the learning process and the driving force to maintain this process They also added that motivation is a major contributor to students’ achievement of long-term goals, which is further enhanced in Olmezer Ozturk and Ok (2014) A retrospective look, however, reveals that initially, linguists focused more on the definition and overlooked the pedagogical implications in the classroom It was not until 1990s that the major/a majority of research examining the motivational behaviors performed by teachers emerged, and since then, researchers have been tapping into this area, providing lists of motivational strategies with little discrepancy Guilloteaux and Dornyei (2008) Despite a growing popularity

of research into motivation strategies, the number doesn’t unlikely seems

to meet the demands This pressing need for more studies conducted in motivational strategies ? (a complete sentence?)

FRAMEWORK

It is universally believed that framework is an indispensable part in any scientific research A glance at this part of the four articles illustrates that they all made use ofadapted the one by Dornyei (2001) as the theoretical base to some extent In this work, four clusters of effective motivational strategies were identified, consisting of 102 motivational strategies, some

of which were selected to be included in questionnaires of the articles being reviewed Respectively in Guilloteaux and Dornyei (2008) and Cheng and Dornyei (2007), 25 and 48 items were picked out to form questionnaires while in Olmezer Ozturk and Ok (2014), Dornyei (2001) was one of the sources of reference when they short-listed the number of teacher motivating behaviors suggested from questionnaires to 88 The