MOTIVATION – THE TEACHER’S RESPONSIBILITY?

R.L. ALLWRIGHT

MY STARTING-POINT is the following strong claim made by Pit Corder several years ago in his well known
paper on learners’ errors: ‘Let us say therefore that, given motivation, it is inevitable that a human being
will learn a second language if he is exposed to the language data’ (1).
I do not propose to discuss the claim itself but rather to see where it leads. Firstly, we should note
the possible implication of the final clause that there is no need to organize, for the learner, the exposure
to the language data. We might prefer the alternative reading, implied, I think, by the rest of Corder’s
paper, that some sort of organization is in fact to be preferred to purely random exposure, but that we do
not yet know which sorts of organization are better that nothing. I do not propose to develop this
discussion, however, as it is clear that, if Corder’s main claim is justified, then there is in any case little
point in organizing language data, or even in arranging for random exposure, unless motivation ins in fact
‘given’. It would seem much more sensible to start with the problem of motivation, because if it can be
solved, mere exposure to the language data will apparently suffice.
Following the logic of this argument, we might come to the conclusion that the key problem is not
how to organize exposure to the language data’ or, in other words, ‘how to teach the language’, but quite
simply, ‘how to motivate the learners’. Clearly the problem would not arise where motivation, in adequate
strength in all respects, could in cast be assumed, but it would, I suggest, be foolish to base our thinking
on such an optimistic assumption, even though it may be justified, sometimes, in happy circumstances.
Although motivation may thus be seen to pose the key problem for the language teacher, that
does not mean, of course, that the solution to the problem is necessarily within the responsibility or even
the power of the teacher.
Taking ‘responsibility’ first, is it reasonable to expect the language teacher to see motivation as
his problem? To answer ‘yes’ seems to demand too much of the teacher, and yet to answer with a simple
‘no’ seems equally unreasonable.
If the answer is to be ‘yes’ and ‘no’, then we need to try to establish (a) to what are we saying
‘yes’?, and (b) to what are we saying ‘no’?
Clearly we need to analyze the concept of motivation in order to begin answering these two
questions. At the same time it seems worth asking about the other potential sources of motivation (2)
that might share, with the teacher, the power over and/or the responsibility for the motivational stat of
the learners.
Represented below in Fig. 1 are thirteen potential ‘sources of motivation’ in the school situation
(3) conceptualized as surrounding the learner. They are equidistant (from each other as well as from the
learner) to reflect the fact that we cannot assume that any one of them, for example, will predominate
for any particular learner at any particular time. They could be classified in many different ways, none of
which seems uniquely apt, and therefore a circular arrangement, with its weak suggestion of links
between adjacent categories, rather than a strictly linear, bipolar one, has been adopted.
One or two of the categories need glossing perhaps. ‘School organization’ is intended to be a
broad category covering, principally, the possible effects that, for example, timetabling, or the amount of
money made available for technical resources, may have on the perceived importance of a subject.
Entertainment and information agencies are included for, in particular, their possible contribution to a
learner’s knowledge of and consequent attitudes towards the target language community.
One final point may need to be made at this stage. It is clear that the influence of any of the more
apparently remote sources may be mediate by one or more of the less remote ones. So, for example it
may well be the language teacher himself, or a careers master if there is one in the school, who will
mediate the influence of potential employers by stressing the importance of language qualifications for
job opportunities, perhaps, or the actual usefulness of language abilities for particular occupations.
We can now return to the problem of analyzing the concept of motivation. The chart in Fig. 2
attempts to do this, and also plots the eleven SORTS of motivation isolated against the thirteen potential
SOURCES of motivation just discussed and now presented in a linear way.
The eleven sorts of motivation, unlike the thirteen sources, have been classified on the chart,
following the basic distinctions used by Gardner and Lambert (4), between intrinsic aspects of motivation,
and, on the extrinsic side, between ‘instrumental’ and ‘integrative’ (labelled Integ on the chart for lack of
space), where instrumental motivation is concerned with materialistic expected outcomes and social
approval within the native language community, and integrative motivation is concerned with social
approval within the target language community (5). I have left the integrative category unanalyzed, but
as we shall see, it deserves considerable analysis, both on account of the major importance claimed for it
(6), and on account of its inherent complexity.

Fig. 1 Sources of motivation

Other school children

The Language teacher

Classmates

Other teachers

‘Outside’
Friends
Head teacher

Siblings

P School
Organization

Parents

Entertainment
Agencies

Other relatives
Potential employers
Information
agencies

‘Instrumental’ motivation has been analyzed into five sub-categories, two of which (‘Better
prospects’ and ‘Bits of paper’)(7) may be taken to represent long-term potential expected outcomes, and
the other three (‘Stars’, ‘Sense of achievement’, and ‘Approval’) potential short-term ones. These labels
are clearly non-technical in nature, and deliberately chosen to give the flavor of each sub-category rather
than to provide a finally satisfactory name. it should be noted that I have not included what might be
called ‘negative’ sub-categories. I am thus assuming that the sub-category ‘Sense of achievement’, for
example, covers its converse ‘Sense of failure’ and the fear of failure that can be motivating.
‘Intrinsic’ motivation has also been analyzed into five sub-categories, labelled to reflect possible
answer to a question like ‘Why do you like English at school?’. Clearly ‘I like the teacher’ is likely to be
related to the extrinsic sub-category of approval, since it may well be the teacher’s approval that the
learner who likes him will seek. It could also be the case, of course, that the teacher is liked because he
gives approval. The line between intrinsic and extrinsic types of motivation is not a very firm one.
The ‘intrinsic’ sub-categories, however, have in common an emphasis on the point that it is the
lessons themselves that are pleasurable rather than their outcomes. They may be pleasurable because
the company of the teacher is pleasant, because the content is interesting in some way (the set books, for
example), or because the learning activities are fun.
What I have tried to do with these analyses of the ‘sorts’ and ‘sources’ of motivation is to draw
attention on the one hand to the complexity of the concept and on the other to the potential collaborators
and opponents the teacher may have to take into account if he accepts any responsibility at all, as it seems
he must, for motivating his learners.
How can we use the charts, however, assuming its analyses are accepted if only for the sake of
the current argument? One possibility would be to attempt to find ways of measuring which would enable
us to plot our learners on the chart individually, so that we could, at a glance almost, see what sources
Fig. 2
Motivation
Sorts Extrinsic
Intrinsic
Instrumental Integ

I like the teacher

Better prospects

F.L. community
I like the sound
English lessons

Bits of paper'
achievement
I like Dickens

acceptance
Approval
language
I like the

Sense of
are fun

Stars'
of it
Sources

School organization
Head teacher
Other teacher
The language teacher
Other schoolchildren
Classmates
Outside' friends
Siblings
Parents
Other relatives
Potential employers
Information agencies
Entertainment
agencies

were most important for which sorts of motivation. We might then be able more satisfactorily to discuss
how a teacher might set about making the best of the situation.
At the moment such a plan would be far too ambitious, but we might at least use the chart to
consider, in the abstract, what results we might get if we attempted to rank the thirteen sources in order
of assumed power for each of the eleven sorts of motivation, and then attempted to rank them again in
order of the amount of responsibility each source could be expected to accept. What would be interesting
would be those columns where the teacher was given first place for responsibility but a much lower
ranking for power. At this stage it can only be guesswork, but I would suggest that the first column might
well show such a result, where the teacher is expected to accept responsibility for making lessons fun, but
where it may often not be in his power to do so, either because of the ‘anti-fun’ ethos of the school,
perhaps, or even because of the ’anti-fun’ ethos of a proportion of the children, and certainly because of
an ‘anti-fun’ ethos among parents. The same result might be expected in all the ‘intrinsic’ sub-categories,
I suggest, leading us to the conclusion that perhaps the teacher is in a far weaker position that we usually
think.
We might expect the ‘instrumental’ sub-categories to represent a stronger position for the
teacher, but even here the position is by no means straightforward. It may not. For example, be the
teacher’s approval that is sought but that of classmates perhaps, and it is sadly the case that, in some
circumstances, approval from peers may be conditional upon ‘not trying’ rather than upon trying.
Similarly, the teacher’s attempts to mediate potential employers’ promises of better prospects for
employees with established foreign-language abilities may be frustrated by a prevailing ethos, illustrated
by the entertainment agencies, going against such middle-class materialistic and long-term values.
Taking the ‘integrative’ category, finally, we see a situation where, although we may wish our
teacher to train his learners to become acceptable, in a variety of ways, in the target language community
it is clearly not in his power to grant such acceptance. It is not even quite so obvious, I suggest, that we
could expect all our motivational sources to support the proposition that we could expect all our
motivational sources to support the proposition that we should be training learners for acceptance by the
target language community. It seems reasonable to suppose that at least some factions within a society
will be against the whole idea of orienting young people towards the values of certain target-language
communities, and yet it is presumably through acceptance of value systems, rather than simply through
foreign-language proficiency, that target-language community acceptance is going to be mediated.
 What is at stake here, of course, is the strength of the interpretation we give to ‘integrative’
motivation. At its strongest, it refers to the immigrant’s possible desire to forget his origins and become
completely integrated into, become in fact a member of, the host community. At the other extreme it
seems to refer to something as weak as the desire to be accepted as a ‘tolerable foreigner’ on a casual
and occasional basis, as for tourist purposes.
Clearly both the teacher’s power and our conception of his responsibility will vary according to
the meaning given to ‘integrative’ motivation. There is not space to develop this point further here but its
importance is obvious enough, particularly when we take into account the strong probability that there
will rarely be any great measure of agreement between the different sources of motivation as to what is
the most appropriate conception of integrative motivation in any particular situation.
What general conclusions can be drawn from the foregoing discussion? We have only been
conjecturing, but if we have been on the right lines then we can conclude that it is all too easy to expect
the teacher to accept responsibility for motivating learners when it is just not reasonable to expect him
to have the power he needs. Basically, then, successful motivation would appear to depend on
collaboration, or at least on coincidental agreement, between major sources of motivation. Taking a larger
view we may wish the teacher to accept responsibility for trying, at least, to influence other motivational
sources so that they work in harmony with him, to talk to parents, for example, and even potential
employers, perhaps, for this purpose. Nut it may well be thought that that is asking too much of him. It
may of course be suggested that the teacher should adapt himself to the prevailing forces within school
and community rather than see it as his job to persuade others to adapt to him.
In spite of these complications it does seem reasonable to expect the teacher to accept major
responsibility for certain aspects of motivation, particularly those directly concerned with his classroom
activities, but only if we accept that it will almost certainly be unreasonable to blame the teacher alone
for any failure. Hence we can reasonably ask the teacher to accept responsibility for making his lessons
interesting, but nevertheless accept that he may sometimes seem justified in saying something like ‘I
prepared a really interesting lesson but they didn’t want to know’. Similarly we can reasonably ask the
teacher to keep his learners well-informed about short and long-term goals and attempt to persuade them
to accept these goals, but he may well fail for reasons quite beyond his control.
To return to our earliest considerations, we can see that our original contrast between ‘how to
organize exposure to the language data’ and ‘how to motivate the learners’ posed a false dichotomy. We
cannot hope to solve all our motivation problems by selecting any one particular way of organizing the
language data. Motivation poses far too complex a problem for that. Nevertheless we will not help
ourselves either by failing to notice that it may be possible so to organize the exposure to the language
data that the learner is likely to be motivated to pay attention to it. When a teacher says something like
‘I taught them that last week but they didn’t learn it’, it seems reasonable to suppose that the teacher
may well have organized their ‘exposure to the language data’ in a perfectly sensible way except that it
failed to attract their attention. It does seem reasonable to expect the teacher to attempt to cope with
such problems, even though, once again, we must be very wary of attributing any failure uniquely to him.
My plea, then is for the teacher to accept a major responsibility for motivating his learners, but
for the rest of the world to realize that the teacher should not be expected necessarily to succeed if he
find himself in conflict with any of the twelve potentially at least equally powerful influences on leaner
motivation.
One final point. It seems that teacher training as currently conducted pays relatively little
attention to the teacher’s role as a promoter of motivation. One reason no doubt is that we just know too
little that would be of real practical assistance to the teacher. Certainly there are not going to be easy
answers. But a further reason is also suggested by our discussion. Motivational problems, as we have
seen, potentially involve the teacher in conflicts of value systems and ultimately in ethical considerations.
Are teachers, and more especially teacher trainers, reluctant to deal fully with motivation because they
are not sure of how to cope with the essentially ethical problems it can raise? Fundamentally the issue is,
in its extreme form, how confident is the teacher that he has the right to motivate his learners in school
to learn a foreign language?

Notes and References

1. Corder, S. P.: ‘The significance of Learners’ Errors’, IRAL, V/4, 1967, pp. 161-70.
2. Clearly we are not concerned only with sources of positive motivation. Negative influences will be at least equally
important.
3. The analysis is based on the ‘typical’ state school system. Any other situation would of source require separate analysis.
4. Gardner, R. C. and Lambert, W. E.: ‘Motivational Variables in Second-Language Acquisition’, Canadian Journal of
Psychology, Vol. 13 (4), 1959, pp. 266-72.