There are some conversations that really stay with you, and this was one of them. I was talking to a former colleague about a coursebook series for teenagers I was working on, and how I was particularly excited about how we had created lessons that I felt were genuinely different from other books that I’d used. I described how we had included philosophy, critical thinking, and social and emotional learning. She listened politely, and then gave me a wry look, and said “Well, that sounds interesting, but I don’t think my students would be motivated by those topics.”
That sentence has been stuck in my head for years. I’ve turned it over in what feels like a million different ways, trying to unpack what it tells me about students, materials and teachers. I write this now as someone who has moved away from teaching in order to concentrate on materials writing and teacher training, and it prompts me to think carefully about motivation and the preconceptions that many of us have about teenage learners from a writer’s perspective. How much responsibility do I have as a creator of lessons for adolescents to make sure that they are motivated to participate?
Teacher Expectations
My subjective experience from staff rooms is that my former colleague is not atypical in putting a lot of expectation onto materials. Few have much of a say in choosing their books, and little time to think about adapting them for their context. For better or for worse, this is the book they have to use and they have to make the most of it as they can. Believe me, as a writer, I feel that weight of expectation! But how realistic is this? Can writers and editors of coursebooks really fulfil this demand?
When I taught teenagers, I found their march towards adulthood interesting to observe. How, at different ages, they reach their milestones in thought and behaviour, and how this manifests itself in their learning, is a fascinating process. It’s also messy and unpredictable, which should perhaps tamper our expectations regarding what materials writers are able to achieve. By definition, we are writing lessons to be used with thousands of students going through life changes at their own speed. I’m not sure we can be expected
to reach all of them equally.
What I do have an issue with is the tendency that some of our colleagues have in painting this age group with the same broad brush strokes. They are often portrayed as lazy, unmotivated and hard to teach. Of course, these students exist, but they can happen in adult classes too. I agree with Maley (Lewis, 2016) that “if we regard teenagers as a golden opportunity rather than as a noxious problem, then we can tap into the abundant energy, curiosity, and critical awareness which this age group displays.”
How not to motivate learners
In our efforts to tap into this energy, we have to be careful in how we go about it. One common technique is to try and include their interests. An example of a shallow way to do this is to include the musicians and singers they like. “Look, here’s a lesson about (insert name of pop group). Isn’t that cool? Let’s learn the present continuous!” To me there are clear issues with this.
Firstly, it’s patronising. Teenagers know what you’re doing. Don’t forget, they spend hours going from one lesson to another five days a week, so they’ve seen all the tricks. They are professionals at this and they can see through it. Secondly, it’s unlikely to create serious motivation beyond an initial flush of recognition. As Lewis (2016) states, “Simply introducing English through popular teen culture will not sustain motivation. To be successful with teenagers, we need to dig deeper and find the themes which transcend generations. Whether you were born in 1950, 1970, or 1990, issues such as:
• self-esteem
• peer pressure
• ethics
• finding one’s own identity
• dealing with relationships
to name but a few, will all have relevance to your life in one way or another.”
Thirdly, it either assumes that teenagers are a homogenised single unit, all with the same taste, or it dismisses the preferences of those who are not mainstream. When I was a teen in the early nineties, I was into grunge, rap and house music. If one of my teachers had brought in a New Kids On The Block song to use, my eyes would have rolled so far back in my sarcastic little head I would have been staring at my brain. Either of these choices can have the same effect which is to disenfranchise students who can already feel like outsiders.
It also runs the risk of becoming outdated quickly. In reality, if you are writing for a coursebook series, there is a long delay of at least a year between when you sit down in front of your laptop and when the students open the book and start that lesson. Trends change in the blink of an eye and what seems relevant today can seem old hat in no time.
I prefer to sidestep these issues in the lessons I create by not even trying to be ‘cool’. Instead, I aim to be engaging, not entertaining. Reducing teenagers to passive consumers of popular culture is condescending and unlikely to result in increased motivation. Technology is another example of this. Many people assume that teenagers are the most likely to be distracted by their phones, but I found that they were far more disciplined and it was the adults who were staring vacantly at a screen whenever they could.
Motivation research
When you look at motivation research, one of the things that is most noticeable is how little attention is paid to age. Zoltán Dörnyei, the great ELT specialist in this area, made few mentions of it in his work. That’s not to say he neglected adolescents, in fact he conducted a large-scale survey of over 13,000 teenage learners over eleven years. This data was used to inform his work into motivation, but not exclusively for teens. The majority of the criteria that he described as crucial for learner motivation apply, irrespective of age.
If we focus on materials, Lindstromberg (2012) mentions several things ‘that can make a lesson interesting’ for teens including:
● Variety
● Clearly understable with achievable goals
● Uses the target language for communication of interesting messages
● Personally relevant
● Of current interest
● Humorous
In describing the key principles behind a coursebook series for adult learners, Bell and Gower (Tomlinson, 2013) identify some of the ways they wanted to make their content engaging. They mention engaging the students on a personal level, not being too serious, new angles on old topics, a variety of subjects, natural language, and personalisation. Going back to Dörnyei, in 1998 he and Csizér identified the central motivational strategies that could be used to create a motivating classroom environment. These included proper presentation of the tasks, making the lessons interesting, personalising the learning process, increasing the learner’s goal-orientedness, and familiarising learners with the target language culture (Dörnyei & Csizér, 1998).
Here we have three approaches to student motivation and engagement from completely different angles. One is focused on the motivating content of teen lessons, one on adult lessons, and another on learners in general, and yet there are clear parallels. By treating our teen learners as another species, we can neglect the common factors in motivation that affect us all, whatever our generation.
The material writers role
As materials creators, we have to compromise. This is the nature of our work. When we create a whole semester’s worth of lessons, we have to walk a path between all of the various interests at play. We are required to balance the needs of the schools that will select our books, the parents of our students, the teachers who transform the pages into lessons, and the learners who we hope will benefit. We have to take into account the needs of our publisher, the boundaries as set by the culture we are operating in, and the methodology through which we believe the students will best learn. It’s quite the balancing act.
So when it comes to the motivation of the students, of course we are going to do our best to create materials that they want to engage with. We have a responsibility to try and make that happen. As writers, it’s our job to make sure that the potential for surprise is there in every lesson and at some point, an open-minded learner will find the topic that motivates them. We also need to make sure that our activities, tasks and approach to learning, no matter what the subject is, always retain the possibility of real student interaction.
The teachers role
But at the same time, teachers and students have to be realistic. It is impossible that every lesson will be interesting to everyone. It needs to be understood that there will be subjects covered that are, simply put, ‘not your cup of tea’. Teachers need to be comfortable with this and ask learners to stick at it because they might be surprised and learn something new. They also need to understand their side of the bargain and that there are many aspects of student motivation which are not prompted by what is written on the page. For example, setting a personal example with your own behaviour, creating a pleasant, relaxed atmosphere in the classroom, and developing a good relationship with the
learners are all things that come from the teacher (Dörnyei & Csizér, 1998). They also need to understand that there will be the students who won’t be that motivated no matter what you try because that’s who they are right now. They have reached that awkward stage of their development, and no coursebook in the world is going to turn them into grade A students.
In one memorable class, I had fifteen boys and one girl. Inevitably, there were the distractors, the whisperers, the teachers favourites, the avoid eye contact-ers, the secret texters, and the quietly get the job done-rs, but there was one other student who would always arrive early and sit as far from the others as he could. He made no secret of the fact that he disdained the other students and thought he was above them. He once told me that for fun he was writing a philosophy book. This was as good an example of the teenager as a work in progress as you could ever find. He was simultaneously awkward and brilliant, arrogant and misunderstood. He could be as infuriating as he was inspiring.
As a teacher, it was my job to do my best with the tools at hand to create a learning environment that he and the rest of his class could flourish in. As a materials writer, I’m trying to make his lessons engaging and educational. For motivation to be present in the language lesson, both are required. We cannot be responsible for the inner workings
of our students’ minds, but together we can create the best conditions for learning and see where that takes us.
