Motivation is one of those topics of conversation between teachers that comes up again and again and never seems to end in a resolution. Teachers often conclude that “some learners are just more motivated than others” without a satisfactory explanation of why. Perhaps it’s their background? Their personal discipline? They’re just not cut out for academic study?

I believe that we’re framing the discussion in the wrong way. From my personal teaching experience, learners vary in their motivation from moment to moment and day to day in the same learner, and from learner to learner in the same situation: one moment they can be detached or distracted but in another they can be fully engaged and engrossed. Why? What are the underlying reasons for this variation in motivation? Bonny Norton and Carol McKinney offer us their insights in the following:

“Motivation and Investment

Drawing on identity theory, as well as the micro-level workings of power in everyday social encounters (cf. Foucault, 1980), Norton and Toohey (2001) have argued that many theories of the good language learner have been developed on the premise that language learners can choose under what conditions they will interact with members of the target language community and that the language learner’s access to the target language community is a function of the learner’s motivation. The concept of motivation is drawn primarily from social psychology, where attempts have been made to quantify a learner’s commitment to learning the target language…

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…The construct of investment, first introduced by Norton (Norton Peirce, 1995), signals the socially and historically constructed relationship of learners to the target language, and often their ambivalent desire to learn and practise it. It is best understood with reference to the economic metaphors that Bourdieu used in his work – in particular the notion of cultural capital. Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) used the term “cultural capital” to reference the knowledge and modes of thought that characterise different classes and groups in relation to specific sets of social forms, with differential exchange values. Norton argued that, if learners invest in a second language, they do so with the understanding that they will acquire a wider range of symbolic and material resources, which will in turn increase the value of their cultural capital. Learners expect or hope to have a good return on that investment – a return that will give them access to hitherto unattainable resources.”

Viewed in terms of learners investing in cultural capital, we can see that they’re constantly making (often astute) predictions and value judgements about what is on offer in a learning activity, what they need to invest to acquire it, and what kind of return they’re likely to see on that investment. If a learner perceives that the investment outweighs the return, or that the capital is out of reach to them, then why should they invest their precious time and effort, and possibly risk failure and perhaps humiliation in front of their peers?

Reference

• Norton, B., & McKinney, C., (2011), An Identity Approach to Second Language Acquisition, Alternative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition, chapter 3, pages 74 – 75, Routledge.