Right now I'm sitting in the classroom trying to motivate my students to write the second instalment of their blogs and thinking about MOTIVATION...

It seems that none of them is really wanting to write their blog, and one or two are looking like I'm asking them throw a baby out of the window!  But when we started this project on Monday and followed it up over the next two days, they all quite enjoyed it.

However, it does take effort, and I think this is where the problem lies.
Though everyone wants to learn English and has demonstrated their motivation by travelling all the way to England at no small expense to themselves or their family, when it comes to putting a certain type of effort into a task, the motivation fizzles.

What is this 'certain type of effort'?

I've noticed a big difference between motivation to do closed tasks and motivation to do open tasks.

By closed tasks, I mean small, simple, easily achievable tasks such as choosing the correct word to go in a space in the text, choosing which category something goes into, matching the things on the left with the things on the right, etc.  In English as a second language learning, these kinds of tasks abound.  They are quick to complete, easy to understand and can be easily found or created for any grammar point of vocabulary exercise.

An open task, on the other hand, is one where the learners have to generate everything themselves.  For example, creating a role-play, practising, and performing it in front of the class.  There is a lot more freedom involved in this kind of exercise since you must create a story, make it interesting, consider the kind of language you will use, if it is correctly constructed, if the vocabulary is appropriate, if you are interacting suitably, and then do the performance at the end.



These two kinds of task are approached very differently by students, whether they be a highly self-motivated group of adult learners or a bunch of teenagers more interested in chatting with their peers than learning anything.  When you put a sheet of writing with some gaps in in front of someone, they have a very well-defined task to do which can be marked at the end for an immediate assessment of performance.  People dive into this kind of task.  A few weeks ago I had a class of Italian teenagers who were mostly out of control, but if I gave them a gap-fill exercise, they would knuckle down for about 10 minutes of frantic concentration.  Which was great!!  The problem was that the task is so narrow and short lived that it required very little imagination and engagement.  You have to give very little of yourself to a gap-fill - it's all already there on the paper.

I got to thinking about this seriously a few years ago when one of my students who had become a good friend started at university.  While studying English at my school he had worked hard and done many exercises as well as being very sociable and using English with lots of different friends.  However, when he started at university his English ability suddenly soared.  The reason for this was that he was being given projects to complete which required him to research thoroughly before compiling the information he had gathered into his own piece of writing or presentation.  This required a great deal of continuous and focussed effort - he had to immerse himself in the task, often for over a week.  He was experiencing new vocabulary that he had to remember in order to understand what he was reading and hearing, and which he would use in his work.  The grammar that he had studied before but never had much chance to use was required in order to express complex ideas (it is predicted that sales will have exceeded 1 million units by January).

While closed tasks do require effort, and students may spend hours and hours at home doing task after task, it is a lazy effort!  But this desire to put in effort in the easiest way possible is not just a problem for students.  I know that I do it too, in all areas of my life.  It all boils down to the path of least resistance.  Imagine you decide to go hiking in some mountains, like the ones shown in this picture.  You want to get from one side of the mountains to the other - do you go over the peak of one of the mountains, or do you go through the valley between the two?  Of course, the valley.  You have decided to go walking in the mountains, but you plan the route to be as easy as possible.  (It may be that your plan is to go to the top of the mountain, but even in this case, you would plan the easiest route that got you to the top). This is all well and good; it would be stupid to plan to use the most difficult route!  But what about if your goal is to improve your hill climbing skill and power?  In that case, selecting the path of least resistance is not the most beneficial strategy.  This is a lot like studying English - it's not so much about the time you put in, or even the effort, but the kind of effort.  It should be via tasks that challenge you to encounter and generate as much (new) language as possible.

To this end, I've recently been trying to set my students weekly projects to complete, from presentations to story writing to creating a blog about something they are interested in.  I'm finishing writing this in the cafe near my house now.  I asked them to finish writing their blogs for homework this evening... we'll see tomorrow whether they have done it!