The Power of Motivation for Education

“Act as if you do makes a difference. It does” -William James

Motivation is the process that initiates, guides, and maintains goal-oriented

behaviors. Indeed, we could say that motivation it’s that keeps the world going and, in our
field, as educational agents maintaining motivation (and other very important factors that
we will see below) is hard work for us as a teacher and is more difficult when we have to
achieve these factors with our students. When I was a recent learner of a second language
in the Colombo many of these factors influenced my learning process and as I observed last
week my classmates also experienced situations very similar to mine so in this essay, we
will learn through very in-depth studies how EFL learners are connected in our second
language process.

When the people make the decision to learn a new language almost always that
decision is sustained by an extrinsic motivation. According to Harmer (2011) the extrinsic
motivation is come from outside are the needs that we look for abroad as a better economic
situation or a trip abroad among other reasons; something curious about this is that when I
was listening to my partners most of them started to learn English for extrinsic motivations,
like Bryam Marin that learn English for a job in a call center or Maria Fernanda learning
English only for a trip to U.E among others. However, when this extrinsic motivation is
transformed into something much more profound and personal, we realize that learning a
second language is much more than a materialistic achievement. What Harmer (2011) say
about this transformation is the process of learning is more passional, we are no longer
satisfied with material achievement alone if we do not seek more personal, social and
cultural achievement. Examples of these can be how Veronica converted her hobby of
English as her support to be a bilingual teacher and help her future students or how John
Eesteban wants to be a bilingual teacher to help the children of Santuario his hometown to
learn more about the culture in a more diverse way using English as tool. As a result, our
learning process become more intrinsic and, in that point, we start to be more autonomous
with our second language learning.

Being an autonomous learning is something not very easy to achieve and I say this
from experience because much of the motivation depends on the pedagogy of the teacher
and how it shows the opportunities that can generate learning a new language. In my case
the autonomy began when I understood that English gave me opportunities to know the
culture of other societies, how they thought, how they saw the world and how I could take
advantage of all that in my profession as a future teacher; and not only I began to be more
autonomous for those reasons most of my colleagues also became more autonomous when
their ideologies became something deeper as I explained previously. But how do we
achieve this autonomy with our students who have not yet found a reason to learn a
language? According to Sabitha (2013) being an independent language learner is
characterized by expanding the learner's options. It is not about the institution or the teacher
is to respond the learner needs and provide our students the opportunity to interact and
understand what is the purpose to learn English. To achieve this independence many
strategies and concepts can help us for example the learner styles which is accompanied by
important concepts such as personality factor or multiple intelligences that Harmer (2011)
says that gives us the ability to recognize and classify different intelligences of our students
to create materials more appropriate to their cognitive abilities to engage them to the class.

As a second language learner and future bilingual educator I have been using and
learning many strategies to not only improve my learning but also to share that with my
students so that they feel more comfortable in the classroom. Two skills that has led me to
have a great command of English are listening and reading, two fundamental skills to
increase the others. I always try to watch parts of my favorite American series every day on
YouTube and for many years I have been keying in comics in English but achieving this
with students can be a challenge. Here is when learner styles play an important part in our
pedagogy as Harmer (2011) proposes using both affective and social strategies students will
be more interested in the content we are presenting and if we want them to be more
independent, the tasks to be proposed must be closely linked to the social environment of
the students and how they live their daily lives so that they can integrate more English into
their daily lives and achieve that independence in learning.

To conclude we all lived similar experiences learning a second language even in our
learning we unconsciously learned or used many concepts we saw in the essay. I have
found that my process has been satisfactory because thanks to English I can now talk with
people from different countries and know a lot more about them and about myself;
something that I want my students to experience someday. I consider that I can be better
and with the motivation and autonomy as it stands out in this essay can be achieved
significant progress personal, social, and cultural. Opening the doors to a new language
helps us expand our cognitive and social limits and our duty as practitioners and teachers of
a second language we must encourage the best way to our students to also expand those
ideologies and skills to achieve a more diverse and entrepreneurial society.

REFERENCES

Harmer J. (2011) Being Learners (J. Hammer, Ed). Cambridge, UK: Pearson
Longman.

Sabitha S.R.N (2013) Learner Autonomy in Language Learning, Turkey: ElSevier