for Choice in Your Curriculum

Boosting Investment and Motivation: Creating a Space for Choice in Your Curriculum

SARA GRAHAM

How 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 Man- darin 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 invest- ment 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 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 motiva- tion — motivation for enjoyment inherent in the task itself. I wondered if I could use proper scaffolding and socially-mediated processes to guide students towards intrin- sic 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 op- portunities, 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 “meaning- ful 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 les- son, I allowed students to engage in what I called a “deep dive” — so that “deep dive” units were interspersed with “treatment

as usual” units where I instructed students how I normally taught. In a “deep dive,” students went deeper into a tangentially or directly related sub-topic of the unit. I helped them find an authentic resource as a starting point, and they had to use learner tools to find unknown vocabulary and grammar patterns. While I was there to help, I had to get very comfortable with not knowing all the answers, but being able to help find the answers. Students then were given an open ended common question to show what they had learned. vocabulary aides, and then have a conversation with me about the recipe and cooking in general. In her self-reflection, she noted that she was able to feel engaged instead of just reviewing past words and she was relaxed and at ease because she could practice and learn more about baking.

I conducted an action research study to measure the impact of units where I used a “deep dive” approach, comparing these to my “treatment as usual” normal practice units. I adapted a published, validated survey to measure motivation, you do generates more questions to be addressed by future work.

Evidence suggests that my “deep dive” approach did increase motivation, and led to an increase in performance. But it is quite a different type of teaching. Generally, this lack of control makes many teachers anxious. People say “but if student one does not know the same information as student two, how can you run the class?” The reality is that even in our first language, we do not know all of the same content or have all of the same

One example came during our unit on food. A student chose to tackle a recipe for cookies in Chinese. I helped her in several ways, which is where the scaffolding and ZPD were present: I showed her how to search the web for a recipe in Chinese, I reminded her how to identify words she did not know and how to use a language corpus to see those words used in other real world, authentic language examples, and I showed her how to identify and learn about common grammar patterns in the recipe. She had to create a unit of study based on that recipe, which required metacognition: what would someone need to know to learn this, what are the key words, and key concepts? As a test of her knowledge, she had to explain how to make these cookies in written form without any

and also collected qualitative data from students. Students generally reported feeling engaged and empowered, as well as gaining ownership, after taking part in these projects. I also noticed an increase in performance on units in which we did not have “deep dives.” It felt as though allowing choice in a controlled way allowed students to perform better even in units they were not as interested in. Analyzing the engagement data I collected showed a statistically significant increase in motivation in the “deep dive” units, with a pretty good effect size of 0.4. One potential flaw I noticed was that for this type of project, higher level and older students performed better. This could be due to age and maturity or level of language competency. As is often the case with research, the project information as our interlocutors. We can perhaps imagine a core of knowledge that all students should know, but beyond that there are rings of more specialist, detailed knowledge; some students will know some of these rings, others will know others, and that’s okay. I can talk to people in Chinese about my own interests such as gardening, but I’ve never driven a car in China and do not find great joy in cars, so I have a difficult time engaging in conversations about cars in both languages. Why should learning a second language be any different? Maybe it’s time to get comfortable with being uncomfortable.

Sara Graham (sgraham@saes.org) teaches Mandarin Chinese at St. Andrew’s.