The role of motivation in learning English is considered in the article, as well as various types of influence and ways to neutralize them. The main problems and issues related to the lack of motivation in learning English among students, which a modern teacher may face and possible ways to solve them are analyzed.
communication, external motivation, internal motivation, language learning, non-standart lesson
In the modern world, without knowledge of at least one foreign language, it is impossible to get a well-paid job. Knowledge of a foreign language indicates a high level of culture and education. The expansion of international relations increases the scope of the English language, which is gradually becoming a global one.
Motivation has become an important aspect of the English language learning process. Motivation plays a special role in any human activity, cognitive processes, it is also a fundamental problem of psychology and can be considered as the main issue of the process of mastering a foreign language. A modern teacher needs to understand what motivation is, possess all the modern arsenal of motivational tools, know all the types and subtypes of motivation.
Motivation is one of the internal psychological characteristics of the personality of a person studying. This characteristic is well expressed externally. It is possible to understand a person’s motivation by his attitude towards something. Educational and cognitive motivation is what every teacher deals with. It manifests itself in the student's special approach to the learning process, the realization of his desire to study well.
I.A. Zimnaya considers motivation as a trigger mechanism of any human activity [1]. Both the worker and the student must be motivated. In total, in the process of studying the problem of the presence or absence of motivation, two main types of motivation were identified. This is primarily extrinsic and intrinsic motivation.
External motivation arises under the influence of the socio-cultural environment. A child guided solely by external motivation, learns English and any other foreign language, because:
• it's fashionable;
• it is useful and will help you learn new skills in your future profession;
• there’s such a subject is in the school curriculum, it is impossible to ignore it;
• he likes the teacher;
* friends speak English well, I want to be no worse than them;
* knowledge of English will allow you to communicate with children from foreign schools;
* English will help you to run your blog, channel, play games with peers from other countries.
English is the second most popular language in the world. It is important to know it for everyone who plans to work on a computer, travel, and receive decent pay for their work in the future. This factor is attributed to internal motivation – to the prospects of personal development in the future. External motivation can become part of the internal and together with it form a communicative motivation. Students try to master a new language in order to get good marks in the lesson and be no worse than others, write letters or chat in English. Language is the main means of communication, so sociable and inquisitive children try to learn English precisely for the purpose of further prospects in communicating with people from other countries of the world [6].
A subspecies of internal motivation is the motivation that arises in the process of learning activities. So, a student may not imagine who exactly he will become in the future, whether his future profession will be connected with the English language, whether he will be able to travel further than his country, region, but at the same time such a student is interested in studying. He learns the language and it helps him to read interesting texts, translate them and feel his own success.
The role of motivation in learning English is extremely high. English seems difficult and incomprehensible to native speakers of Russian. If young children in elementary school are happy to learn letters and words, then in middle and high school, where they are required not only to know poems and small texts, but also complex grammar, rules and large texts, motivation disappears. Starting from about the sixth grade, students can no longer explain why they are learning English. Due to the complexity of the program, interest in learning disappears, only 25-30% of students are still motivated to study. It is during this period that the role of the teacher increases [2].
Using personal experience and theoretical knowledge, the teacher is obliged to form motivation for each student to learn his subject. Motivation formation is understood as:
* creating special learning conditions in which the student has a goal and motive to learn a foreign language;
* the use of psychological techniques that help the student to consolidate the motive that has appeared, not to allow him to deviate from the chosen goal.
When determining the ways of motivation that would help a particular student become more successful in mastering a new language, the teacher has to study the factors of negative influence and look for ways to neutralize them. Negative factors affecting a student's ability to learn a foreign language include problems with memory, with the student's academic performance as a whole, the social and social status of the family in which the child lives. So, it is extremely difficult to give the right motivation to a student whose parents are against learning a foreign language or do not allow them to devote more time to study, taking up, for example, household chores. Not all children have good memory. Faced with the first difficulties, it is sometimes easier for a child to give up further language learning, to receive low marks daily, than to make an effort. In the latter case, it is no longer about educational motivation, but about the lack of will in general. To neutralize the factors of negative influence, teachers should use different forms of work with students:
* didactic games and exercises (to increase interest);
* personality-oriented approach (work individually);
* organization of extracurricular activities (for example, reading books in English, visiting museums to study the history of Great Britain);
* involvement of students in creative activities (creating projects, writing stories, plays, poems in English);
* conducting subject Olympiads;
* the use of modern technologies during the lesson.
Educational motivation is determined by the educational system, the policy of the educational institution, the organization of the educational process, the subjective personality characteristics of the student and the teacher, the teacher's attitude to the student and work, the specifics of language learning [3].
Thus, motivation is the factor without which it is impossible to master any useful skill. If a student does not understand and does not want to understand why he needs to learn a foreign language, then his level of knowledge will gradually tend to zero. Everywhere there is disappearance of interest in learning English from class to class. The older the student gets, the less desire he has to learn the language. Younger students perceive learning as a game, and getting to know a new language as another adventure. But it is difficult to learn any language, even your native one. Therefore, as the program becomes more complex, students lose their desire to learn – motivation. To maintain motivation at a high level and tune students into the learning process, teachers use various forms of work with students. Without motivation, no subject can be mastered, and certainly it is impossible to learn a new language without having an idea of why it is needed. Motivation can be external and internal, the task of the teacher is to discover the motives of the child and contribute to their strengthening.
The most effective motivating factors contributing to the development of English and any other foreign language are games. A variety of games is one of the most effective ways to attract the student's attention to the subject and increase his motivation. If the whole class is playing a game, the winner of which gets, for example, a good mark in a magazine or a sweet prize, then everyone will want to do everything to get as close to victory as possible. Games educate, entertain and teach the student imperceptibly. They also successfully motivate him, because the spirit of competition is strong in children of any age, no one wants to be the last, even in the English language class. The task of the teacher is not only to develop games suitable for age and level of knowledge, but also classes that will be interesting to all students. The game should form certain skills, for example, quick memorization of new words, promote the development of speech skills, teach the ability to communicate, develop important abilities and psychological functions. During the game, new material is remembered and the old one is repeated. Poems, songs and rhymes: new material is easier and faster to digest if all the familiar rules and texts are presented in the form of poems and rhymes. Children of primary school age are especially fond of the poetic form, but high school students and middle school also have nothing against learning complex rules and words using rhymes and analogies.
Most of all, non-standard lessons motivate, during which the teacher, not forgetting the need to issue new material and test knowledge, uses a variety of forms and methods of teaching, for example, sings, recites poems, learns with children and puts on plays in English, watches and discusses films, books. Non-standard forms of learning also include learning new words through reading and retelling books in a foreign language, making acquaintances with peers from English-speaking countries. For example, a teacher may give students a task, for which they will have to register in an English-speaking chat of a university and try to communicate with students. After communication, the students will have to make a report on what happened and what did not, and should assess if their level of English is sufficient for a meaningful dialogue.
Various extracurricular activities are well motivated – trips to English-speaking countries, visits to schools with a higher level of language learning, visits to universities where there are departments of English language and literature [5]. It is useful for children to stage scenes in English, arrange various exhibitions, make wall newspapers and keep magazines. Students perceive extracurricular activities differently from lessons. Even if they are engaged in learning during extracurricular activities, it does not cause them the same discomfort as studying in class for a conditional 40-45 minutes.
Children need to see the result of their efforts here and now, and not in a dozen years, so it is useful to attract students to participate in Olympiads and competitions where knowledge of English is necessary. To do this, the teacher himself must have a good command of English, as well as have access to the Internet, in order to always find interesting and promising events, participation in which will help motivate not only students of his class to learn the language, but also, perhaps, the whole school, the city.
Elementary school students like to make reports in English. The size of such a report may be quite small – one or two pages. But upon successful completion, the student gets a strong motivation for the future, especially if he previously had something wrong with grammar or memorizing new words. It is useful for high school students, under the supervision of a teacher, to give tasks for the production of school stands or a website in English [4].
It is important to remember that grades for modern children play a much smaller role than for students of past decades. Modern schoolchildren value knowledge most of all, therefore, motivating a student to learn new material with the help of good or bad grades is obtained less often than before. Students should be regularly reminded that learning English:
* allows them to watch interesting videos on YouTube, be the first to watch new cartoons and movies in English, play new games;
* helps them understand their favorite songs and communicate with English-speaking bloggers they like directly;
* helps to read comics in the original;
* it will help to improve academic performance in general, since memorizing new words will allow them to train your memory.
Thus, a modern teacher has much more tools to increase the motivation of the student than his colleagues had before. Students are no longer bothered by bad and good grades, but many children understand that the knowledge they have gained will be useful to them in everyday life, when choosing a future profession. A modern child spends most of the day on the Internet, while he communicates there mainly with children from different countries. All of them are united by games, YouTube videos, movies. The translator does not always help out in all situations.
English is becoming a fundamental, one of the most important disciplines in the school curriculum. Motivation is the force that drives all people. A person who has no motive, purpose, desire, will not be able to master any skills, he will not get a job, he will not be able to learn a foreign language. Only the strongest motivation helps an adult to strive to achieve certain benefits. People without motivation live without definite goals. It's almost the same with children. But if adults learn a foreign language in order, for example, to advance in the service and get more money, then the prospects for building a career for a child are still very vague.
Many children start learning the language and make their first successes, because they are just interested in new knowledge. Interest is their motive. But as soon as the interest disappears, schoolchildren stop learning new words, have difficulties in composing grammatical constructions.
The task of the teacher is not to let motivation disappear. To do this, various tools and methods are used to attract the attention of students, interesting lessons are conducted, including game elements, extracurricular activities are conducted.
Motivation is especially important for junior and middle-level students, high school students already understand a lot about the current social and political situation in the world, they roughly imagine who they will work with, so their main motivation is still the use of language for future work. Younger schoolchildren should understand that without knowledge of the language they will not be able to receive a lot of interesting information, communicate on social networks, write to bloggers they like, make friends with children from other countries [7].
In the search for motivation for a particular child, a personality-oriented approach is important. So, children from low-income families are unlikely to learn English out of a desire to communicate with other people, but for them knowledge of the language can become a road to a better life, the teacher should be able to explain it without affecting the feelings of the student. Motivation can be the desire to learn, interest in reading, love for a particular teacher. There are no children who cannot be interested in something. An English teacher has a large number of tools and factors that he can use to attract the attention of students to his subject.
1. Zimnaya I. A. Psychological aspects of teaching speaking in a foreign language. - M.Enlightenment, 1998
2. Bezborodova, M. A. Motivation in teaching English / M. A. Bezborodova. - Text: direct // Young scientist. - 2009. - № 8 (8). - Pp. 156-160. - URL: https://moluch.ru/archive/8/567 / (accessed: 09.10.2021).
3. Bocharova L.P. Games in English lessons at the primary and secondary levels of education // Foreign languages at school. No. 3 - 1996 - p.26.
4. The use of videos when teaching a foreign language in secondary school / M. I. Myatova. Foreign Languages at School, No. 4, 2006.
5. The use of local history material to increase motivation when teaching foreign languages / N. A. Godunova. Foreign Languages at School, No. 7, 2006.
6. Posmetkina N.N. Motivation in teaching and development of a younger student in play activities in foreign language lessons// International Scientific and Practical Conference "Pedagogical management and progressive technologies in education" Collection of articles, May 2006 - Penza, 2006 - pp. 163-166.
7. Theater project in teaching a foreign language at the initial stage / E. M. Gerbach.// Foreign languages at school, No. 4, 2006.
