Tapping into Student Motivation

Wei-ling Wu

West Windsor-Plainsboro High School, NJ

Countless studies and experiments in human learning have shown that student motivation is one of the keys to language learning success. Motivation strongly influences the attitude and effort of a student in dealing with learning tasks. When a student is highly motivated, he or she shows interest in the subject, active involvement in learning tasks, and initiative in inquiry into the subject matter.

Every student has the potential to be motivated in learning, and every student needs to be encouraged to increase and maintain his or her learning interest. Therefore, teaching does not merely mean, “to pass on knowledge”; it means “to inspire students” and “to tap into their motivation.” This was amplified by our great, ancient master teacher Confucius in his saying, “Never tire of learning, never tire of teaching” and in his devotion to education.

Being teachers of Chinese in America, we all realize this undeniable duty to “tap into student motivation.” However, the question is how to engage students in active learning. The Chinese language has unique features of pronunciation, grammar structures, and character reading and writing. However, this does not mean that students have to learn the Chinese language through the so-called “Chinese way of learning”: rote learning, mechanical copying, and boring drills.

In this respect, it is important to look at the basic principals of human learning, and especially to understand what desires or emotional drives can move students to active participation. Research in psychology has identified these emotional drives as the needs for exploration, manipulation, activity, stimulation, knowledge, and ego enhancement. From my teaching experience and observation of other Chinese teachers’ success in their classrooms, I have seen many activities and strategies that appeal to students’ needs for motivation. To name some:

· Language activities that allow students with different learning styles to succeed.

· Pair work, small groups and team competition to make character retention exciting.

· Multi-sensory learning strategies to make learning more enjoyable.

· Sentence manipulation to visualize the learning of sentence structures.

· Learning tasks that challenge students to think and apply what they have learned and so feeling the joy of success.

· Creative use of visual aids to stimulate questions and talking.

· Imaginary learning tasks to add fun to language application.

· Personalized and humorous interaction to connect students with the contents being learned.

Pedagogical choices to motivate students are unlimited. However, in order to motivate students, teachers should be motivated first. We Chinese teachers should be actively engaging in the work of exploring the nature of learning, examining the practice of existing Chinese teaching, and creating an array of efficient activities and strategies that best suit the goals of engaging students to learn such a unique language as Chinese. Actually, more and more Chinese teachers have realized this importance, and many Chinese teacher organizations are working hard to assist Chinese teachers in this crucial dimension of their professional growth. These efforts will undoubtedly bring forth more and better motivated students in our classrooms.