Big Questions in ELT

How do you achieve ‘flow’ in your teaching? Özbek, the publisher’s rep, got on to the subject of ‘flow’. He was driving me from the airport into the centre of Istanbul, and it turned out that he was currently researching a Master’s dissertation on motivation. He was attracted by the idea that intrinsic motivation is located in the present moment, and reaches a peak when you are so absorbed in a task that time seems to slow down or even to stop altogether. The poet W.H. Auden describes the effect of this absorption as ‘the-eye-on-the-object look’, when, for example, skilled craftsmen wear the same rapt expression, forgetting themselves in a function. (from ‘Sext’ in Horae Canonicae) This is what the psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (1990) calls ‘flow’. It is the kind of ‘peak experience’ often reported by artists or sportspeople, when there is a perfect match between performance challenge and available skill. The alternatives, such as too much challenge, or too little, are likely to result in either anxiety or boredom.

According to Csíkszentmihályi (1993: xiv), flow experiences have the following characteristics: 1. they have concrete goals and manageable rules 2. they make it possible to adjust opportunities for action to our capacities 3. they provide clear information about how well we are doing 4. they screen out distractions and make concentration possible.

Appearing as it did around the same time as the popularization of task-based learning, the theory of ‘flow’ offered an elegant rubric for the design and management of secondlanguage-learning tasks. The theory suggested that good tasks should stretch learners, pushing them beyond their immediate ‘comfort zone’, while at the same time providing them with sufficient support so as not to induce anxiety. But since then Csíkszentmihályi’s