Motivation and most specifically, intrinsic motivation, the desire to learn and do well which comes from within the students, is the key to any extremely successful learning journey.
There are many ways we can help students find their lost motivation:
Via an achievable, ambitious and engaging curriculum, avoiding cognitive overload and maximising success, by framing success in the classroom via specific, success criteria and examples and non-examples of what success looks like for languages; by framing failure as a natural and expected step in learning and, therefore, as an opportunity to get better, creating a safe culture in the classroom.
Of course, we can help develop motivation via external sources, which will help create a "I can do and will do" culture in the long term via praise, gamification and real-purpose communication tasks. We can also offer a wide range of extra curricular activities and trips and use culture as a tool to develop a love for languages.
However, the most important tool to increase intrinsic motivation when learning a language, or any subject, in my opinion, is to develop metacognition knowledge, that is the ability for students to reflect on their work and ability and use a wide range of strategies that will help them to carry out specific tasks, in other words, to learn better, by assessing and evaluating their performance, measure it against success criteria, identifying the gaps and improving upon past performances.
Successful learners do this naturally, however, many of a pupils, especially pupils with SEN and those coming from disadvantaged backgrounds need to be explicitly taught metacognition skills.
How can we do this in the classroom?
These are some of my favourite metacognition tasks I carry out in my lessons, some really simple but very effective!
1. Pausing and giving thinking/reflection time throughout the lesson. At some point in the lesson, after several learning tasks, stop the lesson and ask students to write down, without looking at any material, what they can retrieve from memory within the lesson. OUTformation instead of INformation: what can students give you OUT of their brains? They can write this in their books or just in MWBs. Then ask them to look at the learning material, knowledge organiser, lesson notes etc.. and ask them to identify 2 gaps in their knowledge, this could be, 2 structures they couldn't retrieve, 2 concepts, and ask them to set up a personal h/w task to go over these 2 elements as part of their h/w this week. Do this weekly or even in each lesson and start your next lesson asking students, as part of their starter task, to retrieve this knowledge. Could they do it? Why? Why not? Reflect with the students.
2. Refer to and model success criteria in all your lessons. There are many success criteria within the specific skills of listening, reading, writing and speaking in MFL. I tend to focus on the productive skills in a general way, as these tend to motivate students greatly, in my opinion. We use our 5 Magic Powers. We make reference to them as from Y7 and explicitly teach students how a model answer looks like after incorporating this. We use the 5 Magic Powers in conjunction with the Rule of 3: providing information with 3 verbs where appropriate, using the 5 Magic Powers. Then, every time you check for understanding, especially, via the use of MWBs, before showing their answer, again, pause, and ask the students to reflect on what they have written: do their answers fulfill the criteria of success?
3. At KS4, do the above in conjunction with the GCSE Mark Schemes for Speaking and Oral exams. Share the mark scheme, analyse it, explain what it means and model it, with an example and non-example: where in the model text can you identify the success elements of the Mark Scheme? To make this task more accessible to our student we link the GCSE Mark Scheme to our 5 Magic Powers: where in the mark scheme can you apply the 5 Magic Powers?
4. Share your thinking process with the students by modelling how to tackle a task before they do it independently. Divide your thinking in small chunks and take them in your journey with you, with the "We do, you do" technique.
5. To do the above, when showing your thinking, involving students with skillful questions, in order to teach metacognitive regulation, think about the stages of Planning the task, Monitoring the work through the task and Evaluating the strategy.
Planning the task, Y8 example "Ok, so, we need to write down 90 words on the topic of Free Time, including what I used to do in the past and what I do know. Before I start writing, I am going to plan what possible hobbies I am going to use for the past and what hobbies I am going to use for now. Can anyone help me on hobbies I could use? Can anyone tell me how I say "in the past" ? What about "but now"? Ok, now I need to think of how I am going to write my sentences. The bullet point says I need to mention what I used to do before. Ok, how do I say in Spanish "I used to" Remember we have been practising this structure for a few lessons now. (PAUSE, and using Cold Calling). Excellent, "solía" So I am going to write "solía + the hobbies" in my planning sheet. Now I have to think about how I a going to say what I normally do. What options do I have? for example, I may use what I like to do or I tend to do normally. How would I say that? (PAUSE, and using Cold Calling). Excellent, "me gusta/ suelo +infinitive". Let me write it in my planning sheet. Now, I am going to plan about how I am going to incorporate the 5 Magic Powers in this writing so that I get the highest marks. MP 1: tenses, that has been covered already, MP2: opinions, how can I give opinions? What type of opinions? let's write a few examples, MP3: reasons, which reasons can I use for this task? Can you give me ideas? MP4: talking about someone else, how can I incorporate other people’s opinions on my choice of hobbies? I can say: “I like singing but my brother says it is too boring” how would we say that? Can you give me more examples? MP5: using high impact expressions, remember these are the really fancy expressions we can use to show off, can you give me a couple? Ok, now I have my plan on what to write with examples written on my planning sheet, I can start the task. Can you start writing your own version using our plan?” This technique is effective as it also allows you to carry out retrieval practice.
6. Teach monitoring skills as part of your thinking process: “ok, you have been writing for about 20 minutes, can you stop for a second? I will need to see how my writing is going against my plan. Have I included everything I wanted? Is my writing accurate? What is the most important part of the sentence? (PAUSE and cold call), yes, the verbs. Are my verbs correct? I am going to stop and I am going to check that the verbs I have used so far are correct and that I am applying my plan”
7. Teach Evaluating skills after the task is completed: “OK, so now I am going to think how effective my strategy to tackle this task was today so it can be more effective next time. Did I address all the bullet points in the task? Did I apply the 5 Magic Powers successfully? What helped me to do so? How did the plan help me when I was stuck? Could I use this strategy again? How useful was to check my work through the task? Did I pick up any mistakes when I checked throughout? What did I find most challenging in the task? So, based on this challenge, what do I need to focus on for next lesson ?” At this point, with the help of the questions, students can identify gaps (most of the time these refer to accuracy) and can set up a personal target to carry out during h/w for next lesson. Teaching Planning, Monitoring and Evaluating skills, can be used for any task and any skill, including listening and reading too.
8. Once a task has been marked/ corrected with feedback, make sure you plan similar tasks in the near future, each one built upon the previous task so that students can frame progress against past performance: self-reference. In our case, students at KS3 will need to carry out an end of unit test before the Christmas break. This would involve a 90 word piece of writing. This means we carry out around 3 "snapshots of writing" with an open book, each one building upon the previous one, which students will complete throughout the term, in preparation for their final assessment, done from memory. By the time they carry out this assessment, using their metacognition knowledge, students will have had the opportunity to self-reference their work, seeing how their tasks have been improving step by step and enjoy their progress over time.
9. Teach students how to revise. This is particularly helpful for KS4. For this we carry out learning schedules using Padlet. See Example here. This learning schedule, not only tells them what to revise and how, but models the techniques and tools they need to master the different skills in the exam, while inviting them to reflect on their own performance and apply their metacognitive knowledge.
By using the techniques, students, not us, start framing success by themselves, most important, they also start experiencing success and consequently getting motivated from their own learning experience while they become independent learners.
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