Boosting Investment and Motivation: Creating a Space for Choice in Your Curriculum SARA GRAHAM
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ow often do you hear someone say “I took (insert language here) throughout high school and middle school, but I can’t use it?” As a language educator, a little part of my soul is crushed every time I hear that. And yet, I can relate. My own language-learning journey was an arduous process. Due to cultural norms in my family, I “learned” Hebrew for 10 years and French for three, but can’t functionally use either. In 9th grade, I chose Mandarin Chinese - a logical choice for someone who was having trouble with language, right? Fast forward twenty years later, and I’m a Mandarin Chinese teacher. So what happened? When I chose to learn Mandarin, it was internally motivated. The reason for my investment went beyond external factors. As a high school language teacher with my background in language learning, I am painfully aware of students feeling like they have no choice. After all, that was exactly how I felt in my French and Hebrew classes. Even though Mandarin was hard, I stuck with it. Research shows that providing carefully constrained choice in learning can increase student investment and motivation.1,2 But what are the limitations? How much can this actually boost motivation? During the 2018-2019 school year, I set out on a journey to explore these questions about choice and investment in several
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levels of my Mandarin classes. The SelfDetermination Theory described by Deci and Ryan suggests that motivation is on a continuum, from amotivation on one end, to various forms of extrinsic motivation in the middle, to intrinsic motivation on the other end.3 As a teacher, I wanted to figure out how to use choice to get my students to the far right of that continuum, which describes self-determined intrinsic motivation — motivation for enjoyment inherent in the task itself. I wondered if I could use proper scaffolding and socially-mediated processes to guide students towards intrinsic motivation.4 Vygotsky clearly identifies the importance of social interaction in learning through the “Zone of Proximal Development” (ZPD), and unless a learner has support from other artifacts or opportunities, known as affordances, they will not be able to learn.5,6 In other words, students will not be motivated in a class unless they feel the learning is “meaningful and worthwhile”.7 But what does this look like in a curriculum for required classes? In my Mandarin II (high novice/low intermediate, typically sophomores) and Mandarin III (mid intermediate, typically juniors) classes, we cover roughly eight units throughout the year. Every other lesson, I allowed students to engage in what I called a “deep dive” — so that “deep dive” units were interspersed with “treatment
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