Motivating students by goals

162

“for example we meet in the corridor some years later and they say, not just as a compliment only, that they haven‟t been to such good lessons since […] they deal with me or with the lesson as part of their life, not as a task” (Daniella)

“they say thank you […] they give me flowers, […] I can see they like me, […]

they invited me to have an icecream together, or we went somewhere together, and they took a photo of the whole group and they forwarded it to me”

(Ernesztina)

“I adore her” (Csenge).

A good teacher-student relationship is the basis of a successful teaching-learning process, and the nature of the interaction with significant others, including teachers, has long been recognised as a motivating factor (Williams & Burden, 1997). Along with the teacher‟s personality, the teacher-student relationship is of utmost importance to students: they appreciate a relaxed and encouraging atmosphere (Dörnyei, 1996, 2007b) and feel that the teacher‟s personality traits are more important than their professional training (Nikolov & Nagy, 2003). The quotes from the teachers and students above testified, in this case, to a classroom climate that fulfilled the requirments of a motivating environment (Dörnyei, 2001b, 2007b; Williams & Burden, 1997).

163 Flóra, who was firmly convinced that she is going to live outside Hungary), this idea was vague. Other goals mentioned in the interviews included language utilising possibilities (studying for an English major in the case of Csilla or interpreting in the case of Csaba), or emphasising the utilitarian values of English (“it‟s very useful in everyday life because a lot of things are in English” [Csaba]). The fact that the students had no definite goals, but were concentrating mainly on the imminent language exam or school leaving exam, is not surprising. The teachers, on the other hand, expressed more complex ideas (see below).

The students mostly emphasised utilitarian values, such as goals, very strongly.

They all mentioned the language exam, if they had not taken it yet, or the possibility of taking an advanced level exam in the next few years. Although five of them mentioned potential future work places or possible jobs (Brigi: psychology, Bori: chemical engineering, Csaba: interpreting, Fanni: an office job, Flóra: working as a diplomate), the others had no clear ideas. However, they were all convinced that English will play an important role in their lives. Becoming an English major student was a consideration for three of them: Csilla was bearing it in mind when choosing a university, but was not sure yet, Flóra contemplated it too but decided to opt for another subject instead, and Fanni actually spent a semester as an English major student but abandoned the idea, and left the university. As for proximal goals, the most common points mentioned by the students were watching and understanding films in English, reading books in English, English as a tool on the internet and in computer-related contexts, communicating with people in general and talking to tourists in particular. No other goals were mentioned, but it must be highlighted again that work-related benefits were very strongly present in the interviews, and the students unanimously agreed on the fact that they will need

164 English in the future, and thus will have to do everything they can in order to acquire as good a knowledge of the English language as possible.

In contrast to this, the teachers talked about several students not having goals (cf. Mezei, 2011), or about students having only vague ideas that could be identified as goals:

“I think it‟s typical that they don‟t have goals, either with their life or any school subject, not only English” (Cecília)

“it‟s simply very-very limited what I can expect or set as a goal, because they feel, with each new task they feel that it‟s again a new task, and again, and it‟s just enough. So in class, when there‟s a task or goal you have to pretend it‟s not one” (Daniella about adults).

The most common language goals, according to these teachers, were to pass the language exam or school-leaving exam, and general communication.

The above-quoted teacher opinions regarding goals, though definitely based on fact, were not so frequently mentioned in the interviews. On the other hand, those teachers who were more enthusiastic urged their students to reach goals, among which the most common and popular was the language exam. Some teachers seemed to consider this aim as a sort of goal in their own lives, that they constanly worked to communicate to the students, while others made use of every possible occasion to visualise goals. Although the teachers seemed to feel that they were unable to include setting and monitoring goals in the syllabus, they found an alternative way of handling the problem: they encouraged the students to make English part of their life, and enthused the students with the language, as discussed in the following excerpts:

“… one of the parents came in to the school to talk to me, and she said she just came home from the US from a training session and her daughter understands a guy with a Scottish accent much better than her, and she hasn‟t heard her speak for quite a while, and I thought they still keep talking to each other in English for five minutes in the car every morning, and I keep telling the kids how important this is, if they feel they are weak, to talk to someone for five minutes.

And it turned out they had stopped this a long time ago, and she hadn‟t heard her

165 daughter speak, and she speaks fluently and I was shocked myself too, wow, this is great” (Annabella)

“we make them [the students] understand not to do this to themselves or to their parents or to anyone that they don‟t grab the opportunity [to learn]. And it‟s prestige. […] We pay attention to this very seriously so that it works. […] I keep brainwashing them, so to say, if you are here, it needs to make sense, you are in a 8-year secondary school because you‟re special, you‟re the best in this region, so we overdo it, very much so, we use their ego so that they understand that they are special and if they can do it, they must do it” (Boglárka)

“I usually keep referring to it [the importance of English], so it‟s a kind of task which can happen to be in the school-leaving exam or in the language exam, or this is something that makes a small difference that they like to ask in tests, so it‟s kind of referring to it constantly” (Cecília)

“I try to make them interested, I tell them how marvellous it is and then I elaborate on it: a language certificate is not only a document, but they‟ll be able to prove to themselves that they are able to do a reading comprehension test to such a high level that it is worth doing the language certificate” (Daniella)

“I keep pushing them, oh, it would be great if you could pass the language exam.

Really. At the end of the semester when we talk a bit or at the evaluation I always ask them what they want to do, or with the 19-20-year-old generation, what they would like to do later in life and I tell them it‟d be easier to pass the language exam now that they don‟t work yet, it‟d be easier to get the certificate”

(Ernesztina).

Harmonising these students‟ goals is not easy, however. Individual needs can differ tremendously (see above in Section 5.1.1), and setting goals, following them and continuously monitoring them requires energy. In addition, students need to learn to set goals, monitor them and be reflective (more on this is in Section 5.5: Self-regulation), which is usually a time- and energy-consuming process and very few teachers make an endeavour in this direction (a notable exception is in Nikolov, 1995, 1998). Cecília talked about this in connection with goals:

“I guess I should do it myself too, I should develop too to see more, not only what they can‟t do, but things they can or to refer back at the end of units to show how much we‟ve learnt. And then they would have a sense of achievement. […] it‟s like teaching to learn. Or teaching to set goals. Or every week you have to say something you want to achieve and at the end of the week, we should come back to it, have they done it or not? If not, why not? […] I guess there‟s a correlation between setting and reaching a goal.”

166 The phenomenon Cecília talked about is shared by most of the interviewed teachers.

Among the several constraints in teaching that were previously mentioned, this issue was among the ones that the teachers reflected on the most, and is worth investigating, as setting goals is a fundamental part of self-regulated learning and autonomy, contributing, as it does, to the students feeling responsible for their own learning, providing them with a sense of achievement and success, and making them feel that they are members of a team (cf. group dynamics). The role of goals as milestones also appeared in the interviews:

“When it‟s time to give marks, I always take one or two lessons […] to talk to them about their marks, how they feel, whether they feel they‟ve improved or not” (Cecília)

“In this case I highlight something and I praise them, which is not an objective evaluation, rather making them move on” (Daniella)

“Then they start learning like little angels so that they are better next year, or the same at least, so I write very good things about them, maybe a little bit too good things in the first round, they get scared because they need to progress a lot and they must keep to the level” (Daniella).

Several constraints were mentioned in connection with goals for example the number of students in a class, or the difference in student abilities. In spite of these constraints, the teachers were willing to invest energy in goal-setting because they were of the opinion that it will provide students with more opportunities as to setting further goals, and will be conducive to successful language learning. They do set goals even if they thought they could improve their abilities in regard to this skill (along with the students, see the quote by Cecília above), and Daniella‟s observation was that it was worth it:

“I always set higher goals for them, higher than they think they can achieve, I want them to set higher goals, and I tell them that I think they can reach it and they are very surprised at it, and it‟s so positive that they start learning like mad.”

167 To conclude, it can be stated that goals were definitely present in these classes‟

life, but this presence needed to be strengthened and consciously focussed on. The teachers recognised the importance of goals and the difficulty in setting and monitoring goals. The students had goals, even if the teachers sometimes doubted this fact, and as such, the teachers should not have strengthened the so-called Pygmalion effect (Szabó, 2004) by projecting that they believe the students had no goals they wanted to achieve.

Students need to be taught to set and monitor goals if teachers think that this is a neglected aspect of their teaching practice, or an obstacle to achievement. This is all the more important because, as Heitzmann (2008) found in her longitudinal study, motivating students and goals interact in such a way that short-term goals affect how students perceive their progress, which in turn has an impact on their mastery goals and intrinsic motivation, which can lead to a better learning outcome.