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

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 ClassroomOriented Investigation of the Effects of Motivational Strategies on Student Motivation” ROD ELLIS University of Auckland Auckland, New Zealand Ⅲ 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 welcomed 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 specific classroom student behaviors hypothesized to be indicative of motivation and (b) correlating 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 selection 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 specific behaviors are considered to demonstrate motivation It would seem to me quite crucial to provide a theoretical rationale for the choice of these variables TESOL QUARTERLY Vol 43, No 1, March 2009 105 There is a rich literature on attention in SLA Emphasizing the importance 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 fluency, 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 motivational state; (b) orientation, which entails the aligning of attention on some specific type or class of sensory information at the expense of others; and (c) detection, when the cognitive registration of a sensory stimulus 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 participation This is considered to be evident when “students are actively taking part in classroom interaction or working on assigned activity” (p 62) A first 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 106 TESOL QUARTERLY is in fact very slender evidence to suggest that sheer quantity of participation in the classroom benefits 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 measures of learner participation and proficiency 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 beneficial for learning There is much better support for the claim that qualitative aspects of participation are conducive 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 qualitative behaviors rather than focusing just on the quantitative 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 concern what is known as self-selection in classroom process studies This was among the behaviors that van Lier (1988) identified 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 experimentation 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 find 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 computed 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 It would have been helpful to see the separate correlations between the three motivated behavior variables and teachers’ motivational practice MOTIVATING BEHAVIORS IN THE LANGUAGE CLASSROOM 107 of their measures of learners’ motivated behavior are misplaced However, what this correlation shows is simply a relationship between how the students behaved and the teachers’ motivational strategies As Guilloteaux and Dörnyei take care to point out, it does not tell us whether the motivated 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 determining 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 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 language 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 dissertation, 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, 1–25 108 TESOL QUARTERLY Guilloteaux, M., & Dörnyei, Z (2008) Motivating language learners: A classroomoriented investigation of the effects of motivational strategies on student motivation 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 MOTIVATING BEHAVIORS IN THE LANGUAGE CLASSROOM 109