The success in teaching a foreign

language is motivation
To have well-run classes in which students learn, we must see that students'
motivation is favorable toward learning. Teachers evidently feel that student apathy
and lack of motivation are about the most troublesome of all the problems they face.
This lack of motivation is responsible for classroom management, discipline, and
control problems as well as deficiencies in student learning. To learn, students must do
the work and engage in the learning activities. If teaching and learning are to occur,
students and teachers must be orderly, well behaved, disciplined, and courteous. None
of these conditions is likely to occur in our classroom if our students are not well
motivated. To secure such motivation must be one of our highest priorities. Of course
we realize that , the difficulty is not really so much lack of motivation as the
incompatibility of the students' motivation with classroom learning and discipline. Our
problem is to somehow steer their motivation so that it will support our instructional
goals.
Therefore when we teach, it is important that we do our best to build up students'
feeling of self-esteem and utilize the motives that the students already have. To this end
we should do our best to make the learning seem worthwhile and encourage students
to establish suitable objectives. This can be done by taking particular care when making
assignments. If we can keep the class moving along in a lively fashion in a pleasant,
supportive atmosphere in which you reinforce desirable behavior and provide the
students with desirable models, the students' motivation should make your teaching
pleasurable. Although there is no royal road to student learning, there is no reason why
it should be completely frustrating. Let us make learning attractive. Motivation is not
only the key to learning, it is also the key to good discipline.
Learning results from one's interactions with the environment—both what one does to
the environment, and one's reactions to what the environment does to one.
The teacher's job is somehow to get the students to engage in activities that will result in
the desired learnings. This process is the essential ingredient in both instruction and
discipline. We call this process motivation. By definition, motivation is whatever it is
that arouses people to do whatever it is they do.
It is, therefore, strange that we teachers do so many things to turn students away from
learning. All too often classes are so dull and dreary that they alienate students. In these
classes boys and girls encounter a hidden curriculum that teaches them to despise
schoolwork, if not to hate it. From this hidden curriculum the students learn that

a) working hard, trying hard, and going beyond the minimum requirements do not
pay off;

b) the extrinsic rewards of schooling may be obtained more easily by other methods
than by academic endeavor. For instance, soft soaping the teacher or throwing the bull
may bring a student more and better results than diligent study;
c) it does not pay to be too successful. Excellence in schoolwork may cause the
student to be pilloried by other students as a violator of the peer culture or as a greasy
grind, or to be singled out for extra work by the teacher;

d) "conformity is rewarded"; originality and creativity are not. It does not pay to
think for one- self, to be enterprising, or to have original ideas. Imagination, creativity,
and thinking are not acceptable classroom occupations;

e) "curiosity is irrelevant." What one is supposed to do is to learn the prescribed

lessons. To be curious about the subject matter and to try to find out more about it
upsets the teacher.
So it is that although primary and gymnasium school students may study to learn,
lyceum students have learned to be more interested in what schooling will get them
than in the learning itself.

Motivation is extremely complicated. In a strict sense no one can motivate anyone else.
In the first place, everyone is already motivated. When we say that a person is not
motivated, we mean that that person is not motivated in the way we would like him to
be. In the second place, everyone's motivation is personal. No one can give a motive to
another person. Of course, it may be possible to frighten someone into action, or
persuade someone to do something. But, in truth, in these instances, as in all others, all
one really does is to influence the other person's motivation.
Influencing another person's motivation is not a simple task. For one thing the person is
already a tangle of different and perhaps conflicting motives. Some of these motives are
innate. Among these are need for security, avoidance of hunger, dread of pain, need for
activity, craving for stimulation, and sex. Other motives are learned. Learned motives
include desire for certainty, need to achieve, craving for companionship, desire to re-
duce anxiety, requirement for independence or dependence, and many more. Innate
motives are very powerful comprising, as they do, basic human needs. When innate
motives are aroused they are likely to take over. Then the higher learned needs must
usually stay on the back burner until the innate motives have been quieted. The learned
motives themselves vary in intensity. Some may be very strong and some very weak.
However, the strength of these motives may change, for circumstances do alter cases.
Motives, both basic and otherwise, tend to compete with each other. For another thing,
when students walk into your classroom, each one brings a hierarchy of motives that
range from very strong to very weak. These hierarchies are personal; they differ from
individual to individual. One girl's need to achieve may be much stronger than her
need for peer approval, whereas her sister may be much more influenced by peer
pressure than by a desire to achieve. Further, the priorities within an individual's
hierarchy of motives change with time and circumstances. At times everyone
suppresses certain desires; at other times circumstances make certain motives almost
uncontrollably powerful. Still, on the whole, most motives retain their relative positions
within one's hierarchy of motives even though circumstances modify motives and alter
their importance.
For a third consideration, motives are affected by many factors. In classroom situations,
for instance, student motivation depends not only on the power of the student's
competing personal emotions but also on the impact of attitudes toward the subject
matter to be learned, past experience and such other considerations as the learner's feel-
ing tones, the learner's interests, the difficulty of the learning task, knowledge of results,
the relationship of the activity to the reward for learning, the student's learning style,
the teacher's teaching style, the classroom atmosphere, the student's attitude toward the
content, and the student's previous experience with the subject.

How to Motivate Students

How, then, does one motivate students? Unfortunately it is not easy. Techniques that
work well in one situation may be useless in another. Incentives that create enthusiasm
in some individuals in a class leave others completely indifferent. However, general
approaches that seem to apply to the development of positive motivation toward school
learning include,
*Try to build up students' feelings of self-esteem.
*Take advantage of the students' present motives.
*Make the potential learnings seem worthwhile.
*Help students establish suitable tasks and objectives.
*Keep up the pace.
*Develop a receptive mood in the learners.
*Provide a pleasant environment.
*Cultivate in the learners ideals and attitudes conducive to learning.
*Utilize reinforcement theory as much as feasible.
*Provide good models for students to fashion themselves after.
The best motivational devices and techniques are positive in nature. In the past teachers
have placed too much emphasis on negative, aversive punishment measures in
attempting to motivate and discipline. It is time for us to turn from negative motivation
to positive motivation. Success breeds success.
Motivation is too important in the teaching-learning process to be left to chance. It is the
key both to good learning and to good discipline. Only students who are well motivated
learn well. When students fail to learn, the chances are great that the basic cause of the
trouble has to do with motivation. The fault lies with the teacher and the school as often
as it does with the students, for they have not taken steps necessary to motivate students
to work and study. Fortunately all kids can be motivated.
Since each of us has a valuable commodity to sell to sometimes unwilling clients, it is
important that we find a way to motivate them. If we can do so by positive means, the
chances of successfully teaching our students will be greatly enhanced. Unfortunately,
positive motivation does not always come naturally. More frequently than not, we must
convince reluctant students of the value of our wares and create in students an inclination
to buy. Fortunately for this purpose, we have many tools and techniques at our
command. One of them is to harness as far as possible students' natural motives, such as
curiosity, attitudes and ideals, desire for success, self-esteem and security, love of fun,
adventure and action, and need for friendship. Another method is to try to make the
subject matter seem valuable to the student. Perhaps the best way to do this is to really
believe in the material's importance yourself. In this connection one should remember
that students are more likely to be moved by immediate rather than deferred and intrinsic
rather than extrinsic values. Because people respond differently to things, individual
motivation may be fostered by making adequate provisions for individual differences.
Marks have not proved to be adequate motivating devices for most boys and girls;
teacher-student planning has been somewhat more successful.
New ammunition for the development of techniques and strategies that can be helpful
in the motivating of students can be found in reinforcement theory. Basically this theory
holds that one should reward students when they behave in the way one desires, but not
when they behave in undesirable ways. Unfortunately many of our present disciplinary
procedures tend to reward untoward behavior. As we develop and use teaching methods
that utilize reinforcement techniques properly, we should find our students becoming
better motivated and better behaved. Among the techniques recommended are judicious
use of rewards and the use of contingency contracts, reinforcement menus, and modeling.

Vladimir Bulat
Profesor de limba engleză
Grad didactic unu
IPLT “C.Stere” Soroca
Republica Moldova