Discover

America

T

his issue features what has been since 1976 an annual offering: a record containing original listening material for classroom use, together with a printed transcript, linguistic and cultural notes, maps, and such related information as we hope will be useful to teacher and students. This year's special section is a direct response to the expressed wishes of a number of readers. When asked what kinds of visuals and subjects they would like us to include, the majority expressed a desire for maps, and city maps rank high on the list. "Tell us about other American cities," they say, "as you did about Washington" (which was featured just five years ago).

We select articles for this journal with an eye to (among other things) a geographic, linguistic, and cultural balance, internationally. So it seems fitting to strive for a geographic, linguistic, and cultural balance nationally in the places and people chosen for our annual insert. The 1988 issue featured a visit to Washington by plane; in 1990 some train travelers went from Chicago to Pasadena; 1991 saw riverboats ply the Mississippi River to New Orleans; and in 1992, cowboys on horseback drove longhorn cattle from Texas to Kansas. So how about Boston by automobile? Other interesting cities-New York, San Francisco, and San Antonio among themhave had at least "cameo" roles in other issues. Also, we believe in the well-known advice to writers: it is better to write about something you know from experience. Like the characters we created, we, too, have traveled to

Washington by plane, have taken a train trip from Chicago to Pasadena, and, on numerous occasions, have driven to Boston and other parts of New England from New York State. (Admittedly, the closest we ever got to a cattle drive was attending a rodeo in Texas.)

The natural beauty of the New England coastline and wooded hillsides beckons and rewards the visitor at all seasons of the year. The region is rich also in history and literature, in arts and letters and intellectual culture. Boston itself, with its ethnically and culturally diverse population, has most of the problems, as well as benefits, of big cities everywhere. But the New England character is most clearly seen in the less metropolitan areas. There the word Yankee takes on a special significance quite different from its broader meaning of simply a United States citizen. The particular character of the people, rock-solid as their surroundings, has endured through centuries of change, growth, and environmental strains. To savor something of the real New England, only hinted at in our pages, the listener or reader will have to add the magic ingredient of imagination (all the more precious in today's video-saturated world).

For readers less interested, or altogether uninterested, in the special listening/reading material, this issue contains a considerable amount of food for thought-18 articles in all-for EFL teachers in a variety of situations and circumstances, and reflecting, to a degree, the linguistic, geographic, and cultural balance we hope for. -ACN

Learner Drives in SecondLanguage Acquisition

Christopher F. Green
Institute of Language
in Education
Hong Kong

It is often assumed that motivational aspects of the second-language learning process are immutable phenomena-either conferred benefits or irksome constraints for the teacher. The general belief seems to be that students either enter the learning process motivated to learn or they do not, and that the consequences of this lottery have to be accepted and accommodated.

In this brief and preliminary article aimed at teachers of General English working with students at all post-primary levels, I want to suggest that learner motivation is actually in a constant state of flux brought about by a concatenation of developmental, personality, and attitudinal factors. This point alone means that the area is one of limitless rich ness and complexity. However, although motivation is a deeply personal impulse, it is possible to identify levels of motivation under which individualistic factors are largely subsumed. This is fortunate in that it enables us to discuss an essentially subjective topic in more general terms, and so identify ways in which pedagogic planning can take aspects of

learner motivation into account.

Three main levels of motivation are readily identifiable. These are displayed below with their various definitions and drives. Needless to say, the levels are in constant parallel interaction.

HOLISM: THE WHOLE-STUDENT

APPROACH

Abraham Maslow's pioneering work (1954) in presenting a unified hierarchy of individual needs that naturally motivate human behaviour was influential in Western education systems in the 1960s and early 1970s. Maslow's hierarchy is constructed on the essentially Western notion that maximal ego-centred development is the goal of every individual. The hierarchy represents the individual's progress in meeting needs and wants that range from the purely physiological to the highly. creative, from survival to self-actualisation.

This explicit description of what is entailed in the process of "becoming whole" has helped teachers to perceive learners as constantly striving individuals, since at each level of attainment a new need is created, defined, and potentially limited to some extent by the degree of success achieved at the previous level. The developing and enquiring individual, then, is constantly in a state of what might be termed necessary and beneficial disequilibrium. I believe that the concept of learner disequilibrium has profound implications for teacher behaviour; these are elaborated as the discussion develops.

Maslow's work, however, is of limited direct relevance to the language teacher; he makes no reference to the position a second language might occupy on the hierarchy of needs. Despite this we can guess with some confidence that the position is likely to depend heavily on the cultural and occupational context in which the individual finds himself. Maslow does, however, provide an important global, if semi-deterministic, view of the individual as a striving organism, a view that may help the teacher to be more aware of the student in whole-person terms rather than simply in his or her studial capacity.

THE CULTURAL-LINGUISTIC
DIMENSION

At the level of the individual within and across cultures, the motivation to learn a foreign or second language has tended to be stated in dichotomous, either-or terms; that is, a learner is driven by either instrumental or integrative motivation (Gardner 1968 and 1979). Instrumental motivation is engendered and sustained by extrinsic forces such as job getting, promotion enhancement, or passing examinations, while the integrative type is generated intrinsically by positive perceptions of the target-language culture and its peoples. Gardner himself has stated unequivocally that integrative motivation provides the strongest, deepest, and most lasting

drive to learn the target language. Perhaps the most important feature to note about learners motivated by instrumental ends is that they may take a dangerously short-term view of learning, resulting in fossilisation of key aspects of the target-language system and their communicative use. As Stevick noted (1982): "Apparently people acquire as much of a language as they really need for what they really want, but only that much.”

It is, nevertheless, surprising that the categories of instrumental and integrative motivation have been accepted as canons of linguistic law, since this dichotomy, like any other dichotomy, may be a useful contrasting device but can hardly hope to account accurately for the actual operations of such a multifaceted, elusive quality as motivation. Gardner's research data originated from the bilingual situation in Montreal, and the closeproximity nature of this environment may have produced too strong an emphasis on integrative motivation for wider applicability. Porter Ladousse (1982) seems to support the notion that the integrative variety has little relevance other than to close-proximity environments.

In fact, the social context in which the second-language learning takes place may well be a very powerful constraint on the development of that language, in that the context provides the parameters of intranational identity and solidarity. It is clear, taking Hong Kong as an example, that close-proximity bilingual environments do not necessarily engender integrationist tendencies. Luke and Richards (1982) present a convincing case for regarding Hong Kong as essentially separatist in sociocultural terms, while Pierson and Fu's (1982) findings point up an important linguistic consequence of this duality—that is, Hong Kong people's negative perceptions of other local people who speak English in situations where the use of Chinese would be natural.

In sharp contrast to all this is the fact that in Hong Kong the level of instrumental motivation to learn English runs very high. Perceptions of English as low in status but high in utility set up a strong contradiction in the learner. He or she needs English to achieve success in terms of education and occupation, but at the same time the majority of Hong Kong people have strongly antiintegrationist tendencies. This attitude is manifested linguistically in the very high levels of virtually intractable fossilisation

English Teaching Forum • January 1993

This kind of low affective drive is common to many contexts in which English is a foreign, rather than a second, language. There is, of course, little the teacher can do to change cultural-linguistic constraints speedily, although, as will be described later, these may be modified to some extent. Incidentally, it is interesting to note in passing that, in sharp contrast to English, French and Japanese in Hong Kong appear to enjoy high status but have relatively restricted utility at present. These positive percep

Learner motivation is

in a constant state of

flux brought about by

a concatenation of

developmental,
personality, and

attitudinal factors.

tions are, perhaps, the result of admiration for particular facets of French and Japanese cultural-economic life: style and economic success, respectively.

The strongest strain of integrative motivation-drawing closer to or actually integrating into the target-language culture-seems, then, to be generally untenable. It is certainly difficult to conceive of a degree of own-culture alienation so great, or target-culture attraction so overwhelming, that an individual would wish to disown his own context of development completely, although some isolated instances of this do, of course, exist.

It is rather more likely, as indicated above, that specific features of the targetlanguage culture may be admired or particularly valued by learners. Flavell (1984), for example, reported on the very considerable number of young Brazilian adults learning English to understand and possibly perform Anglo-American pop music. This particularist and narrowly focussed motivation is actually a very positive, and potentially expandable, phenomenon and once again indicates that, in reality, there is probably no

strumental and integrative modes of motivation. Interestingly, Burstall (1975) found that the two motivational drives by no means stand in mutual exclusion or contradiction, and that non-threatening and successful learning experiences develop positive attitudes to the target language, its people and culture that were not present at the start of the learning programme.

For the teacher this realisation is a

crucial breakthrough because it promises a way in which positive attitudinal and instrumental drives might be linked to achieve optimal learning through combining extrinsic and intrinsic elements of motivation. In this way it might be possible to take the learner from limited perceived target-language needs to a positive desire to learn more about a culture through its language and so continually progress in the acquisition of the target language. This is not to say that the learner is likely to become integrationist in any strong sense, but low affective drive and the resulting high level of fossilisation might be prevented.

I want to suggest, then, that integrative motivation might best be redefined as a force potential in any environment conducive to second-language acquisition, while acknowledging that it could equally well be viewed in universal, nonlinguistic terms as the drive for acceptance and security to bring a sense of belonging to a particular community.

THE COGNITIVE-ACADEMIC
DIMENSION

I use the term cognitive-academic to refer to the level of the individual in formal learning situations. This is naturally the level at which teachers are most directly concerned with questions of student motivation. Burstall's findings (1975) strike an intuitive and positive chord for many teachers: that no matter how poorly motivated a learner may appear to be, the aware and sensitive teacher can actively develop strategies to generate, harness, and sustain a motivational dynamic not entirely directed towards instrumental ends. I want to propose an integrated five-point plan, one that as presented is not very elaborate but which should provide a practical framework for the enhancement of motivation in the second-language classroom.