Motivation is simply the desire, reason or impulse to act. It’s what’s gets you going venturing fearlessly, taking risks but aspiring to success. Barbara Grace puts it, “Motivation, for most people, involves dangling a carrot, some form of reward to aim for. It stirs us to strive for the goal, achieve the target and aspire to something beyond our comfort zone.”
No two teachers would disagree that motivation is the lynchpin of teaching; but for motivation, teaching is at once dull and uninspiring. A teacher, for example, hemmed in by myriads of demotivated learners is utterly a miserable sight, some are yawning and others are making havoc of desks and light bulbs! Teaching with missing motivation is actually a car with a dead battery, a soulless bloodless body and an overcast weather, much to the delight of haters of teachers and teaching who sit in cafes in swarms and turn them into anecdotes and joy in their pains!
Conversely, teaching imbued with motivation is an energetic athletic pony and a blossoming flourishing spring. It’s agleam with life and vivacity, and the semantic field itself surrounding the term motivation also teems with vigour and life; words such as motion, move, movement, motivated, motive and motivity, to state but a few, all throb with a strong pulsating rhythm.
Much ink has been dripped, a profusion of slides have been designed, a bevy of quotes have been improvised and a host of e-books have been realised to tackle the issue of motivation. Besides, so many theories, like the five-layer pyramid of Maslow and the model of Herzberg, came out to inspect such a topic. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs starts with physiological needs at the base of the pyramid to end up with self-actualisation at the top. Yet, Frederick Herzberg concluded that there are real motivators like achievement, recognition, responsibility and personal growth, whereas the salary, security and work conditions are merely Hygiene factors; they simply maintain motivation.
Needless to mention there is intrinsic motivation emanating from within and extrinsic motivation engendered by external factors. A learner does his best to brush up his English because he is fond of it; the enjoyment he feels is an inward motive. Quite contrarily, a learner who excels in English mainly because he is driven by the final mark or the passing grade he will get is a clear instance of extrinsic motivation. Another example of extrinsic motivation is an employee who gets diplomas and betters his CV not because of love for the job, but in quest of promotion and high pay.
To facilitate the task for readers and researchers alike, let’s superficially and quickly refer to motivation in the official pedagogical guidelines 2007 related to teaching English. Motivation is stated in areas related to speaking (p. 14), autonomous learning (P.45), affective language learning strategies (p. 48), self-assessment (p. 50), lesson plans (p. 53), pair work (p. 54), project work (p. 57), continuous assessment (p. 62), and listening (p.67). On the whole, exaggeration apart, it is closely related to all areas of teaching.
Eventually, were teaching a body, motivation would be the soul and were teaching a heart, motivation would be the blood coursing through the veins. Teaching is a success in proportion as we enhance factors that highlight motivation and according as we fight inhibitors of motivation. In the upcoming article, we’ll attack, dear readers, enhancers and blockers of motivation in so far as you look forward to them, so stay tuned.
