ELT Meeting Participants Motivations

ELT – Meeting Participants’ Motivations, by Joan Bartel -- TESL Ontario Conference 2008 -- Page 1

ELT – Meeting Participants’ Motivations

A Presentation and Conversation with the Audience

by Joan Bartel

TESL Ontario Conference, Nov. 14, 2008

Abstract

In many ELT programs the goals are mainly language-oriented: to improve CLB levels and teach occupation specific language for job search and retention. But does that match participants’ motivations for attending? The presenter discusses how ELT instructors can help meet participant motivations within a program’s scope by acknowledging the motivation of ELT participants, establishing our own credibility to help them reach their goals and embedding language skills in relevant topics. Members of the audience share their own ELT teaching experiences on this subject as well. An annotated bibliography and resource list is provided.

Note: the paper is written in the conversational style of the oral presentation.

Introduction

Our ELT participants lack sufficient language skills and, often, cultural knowledge, for successful integration into the labour market. Many of them have tried and failed to find a job commensurate with their training, while others have just arrived in Toronto and lack exposure to Canadian work culture. So when they find a course with their occupation’s name on it, virtually all of them are motivated to attend. The questions to be addressed in this workshop are:

· What motivation do participants bring and how does it help, or hinder, their learning during the course?

· How can we facilitators/instructors respond to meet their motivations effectively within the bounds of our programs? (This is a multi-faceted question.)

More specifically, the presentation covers four areas:

1. First we will explore the relationship between the audience and ELT programs.

2. Next I’ll report briefly about my research into the field of motivation of adult second language learners, including sharing some experiences on the motivations of my ELT course participants.

3. Then I’ll go on to refresh your knowledge of the goals of ELT.

4. Finally, I’ll compare participants’ motivations and the ELT course goals to see how well they match and where problems may lie. I’ll discuss how ELT instructor/facilitators can satisfy the needs of participants within the scope of the programs we deliver, through:

· our own preparation

· curriculum design.

On this last, and major, point (#4), we as practitioners (instructors and facilitators) in ELT can share our experiences in working with internationally trained professionals.

1. The audience’s relationship to ELT

So – “motivated participants” – does that describe YOU, the audience today? What motivated you to choose this workshop from among the many interesting offerings this afternoon? Perhaps many of us feel a little isolated at our workplace, if there is only one ELT program there. As for myself, I was the only ELT person at my workplace – twice – so I was, like some of you, alone in my endeavours – and glad to attend a conference like this to discuss issues and compare notes.

First I’d like to get an idea of what part you all play in ELT delivery. How many of you:

o are ELT instructors, in the classroom daily? (This workshop is primarily for you.)

o Of those:

§ how many have previously worked in non-classroom/facilitation jobs?

· …in Canada?

§ have a background in the occupational field of the class?

§ have career counselling or job search training as well as an ESL background?

o are program Co-ordinators or Heads; i.e., work with instructors but are not in the classroom much?

o are Job Developers or Mentor Co-ordinators or others?

Why all the questions? I’d like to be able to include reference to as many roles as we have here today in the workshop.

And I also think that some of these questions are the very ones that our participants might have in their heads when they apply for and begin our courses. We’ll get back to that later.

2. The motivations of adult language class participants

2.1 A little background

What does “motivated” mean? I think we all have a general feeling for what it means. I have not done a lot of recent research on the term, but the Oxford Canadian Dictionary of Current English

defines a motive as:

“a factor that induces a person to act in a particular way.”

And to motivate is to “cause to act in a particular way.”

There is intrinsic motivation, which refers to factors within oneself that cause an action, e.g., you want to prove to yourself that you are able to do something, and extrinsic motivation, meaning factors outside of yourself that induce you to act, e.g., an immigrant join an ELT course because an employment counsellor says he/she has to in order to keep EI payments.

I have been interested in motivation as a factor in language course enrolment of adults for a long time. In fact, I wrote my Master’s thesis on that topic years ago. I was doing my Master’s at the University of Bonn, Germany, where they have a unique program in “Language Teaching Research.” Although it wasn’t usual at that time that a student did an empirical study for a thesis there, I undertook to do a questionnaire in the local School of Continuing Education.

In that municipal school (in Germany) there were many courses of English as a Foreign Language, mostly general courses but a few Business English classes as well. There were French as a Foreign Language classes as well. I designed a four-page questionnaire about several aspects of the learners’ motivations for taking the classes and about their goals and garnered 371 completed surveys. The results, which proved statistically significant, showed that learners studying General English (as a Foreign Language) had very different reasons, motivations, from those studying Business English.

There were three groups of learners:

1. The General English learners were mostly motivated by an interest in learning in general and specifically learning about England and the U.S. (where English is spoken) They also had social reasons (edutainment, meeting friends). They often studied over several semesters or even years.

2. The Business English learners, on the other hand, knew more exactly what skills and vocabulary they wanted to attain, which usually revolved around communication with international business people. Business classes were offered at intermediate and advanced language levels, and there, the learners usually attended a few semesters. However, lower-level learners who wanted business content could not find it; they rarely stayed longer than a semester in General English classes, presumably because such classes didn’t meet their desires – or their motivation changed.

3. A small group of learners was discovered, most of them taking Business English, most younger people, who were there because they had a vague idea that the course would help them some time in the future, perhaps to get a job. This group seldom stayed more than one semester – or their motivation changed.

The results of my study showed that the motivations of business students wouldn’t be satisfied in general English courses. – Does this remind you of job-seeking immigrants in a general LINC 6/7 class? – The results also led to the recommendation that business language classes begin at

lower levels. The Director of the School for Continuing Education used these results when he made the decision not to cancel the Business English program even though its student numbers were consistently smaller than the General English program numbers.

Why do I mention this study? Because it shows that it’s not “ONE SIZE FITS ALL” in language instruction. Furthermore:

o It showed that learners whose motivations were not recognized – for example, students who wanted business English – would not stay in general classes.

o It also showed that, if learners did not know why they were taking a class (that third group of learners), they generally would not stay long either.

I do not know of any study just like that in the realm of ELT and Bridging programs – it would be interesting to do one. More research is needed in this area.

2.2 The motivation of ELT participants – a small survey

I think many of you will recognize the lessons to learn. To reiterate what I said in the introduction, we all know that our many of ELT participants do not have sufficient language skills for successful integration into the labour market. Many of them have tried and failed to find any job in their field, let alone one commensurate with their training. Others have just arrived in Toronto. So, as I said, when they find a course with their occupation’s name on it, virtually all of them are motivated to attend.

They are motivated. And yet, some drop out early. Why?

o Are the drop-outs unsure of their motivation, or is it too weak to sustain attendance (like Group 3 in my Master’s survey)? If so, then I suggest that the program needs better screening at the outset. There is a question for Program Heads and Co-ordinators: shouldn’t we be able, through a counselling-type pre-registration interview, to identify weakly committed individuals and offer them career decision-making counselling to find out what would really help them the most? Because it is not likely to be ELT. They have other decisions that they need to make, perhaps child care arrangements, or whether they even want to go through the effort of giving up their survival job to seriously explore getting back into their field.

o Or are we not satisfying those drop-outs with strong motivations, not meeting their needs?

To help discover why people joined the ELT programs I led, I developed a short questionnaire that asked ELT participants a few questions, including one on their motivation to join such a long course (depending on the program, 6 or 10 weeks full-time, 20 weeks part-time). The question on motivation was:

Why did you decide to join this long program?

(a) Mostly because it will help my English skills.

(b) Mostly to get a work placement and Canadian experience and references.

(d) Mostly to meet and join with people from similar backgrounds.

(e) Other:

I did not explicitly put in motivations of an “edutainment” nature, but in option (d) “Mostly to meet and join with people from similar backgrounds,” there is recognition of social motivation.

What do you think they answered? For my January 2007 ELT class of Agriculturalists, the overwhelming majority were motivated by the desire (b) to “get a work placement and Canadian experience and references.” This may surprise those of you who thought the participants wanted a real job – and yet you, too, are not wrong: While that particular class wanted job placements, the previous class were not at all interested in them. They wanted real, paying employment only. They could not afford to spend 6 weeks in an unpaid placement position.

In my 2008 classes for IT professionals, where the majority of participants arrived in Canada only very recently, there was 50% interest in improving their English skills, 50% work-related motivations.

This was a very small study, involving about 35 participants and only one question. It may not be statistically significant. There are many participant variables relevant to motivation that were not assessed. My experience suggests that length of time in Canada greatly affects participants’ motivation to attend an ELT class, for example, as does the presence or absence of a working spouse or partner. It would be interesting to carry out a more extensive survey. CIC has been collecting data on immigrants’ experiences, for example, with language classes like ELT, but not, so far as I know, on their motivations.

But, taken together, we do see a strong motivation for job-finding or work placement in most ELT participants in my study, with language learning in second place.

[Sorry, ESL instructors: your expertise, in the narrowest sense, is not what a lot of ELT participants are mainly looking for. (I’ll come back to this later when discussing how we can meet their needs.)]

In other words, language and social skills improvement was not a sufficient motivation for most of them to join up. In fact, participants who found a reasonable job in their field during the course dropped out – their motivation was satisfied, their goal reached.

None of my ELT participants with new jobs stayed in the class just for the other reasons, language upgrading, cultural or social.

If I were to do further research on the topic of motivation now and expand the survey, I would include additional questions, including one about learning “Canadian business culture” or similar term. This rather vague concept comes up over and over in discussions on the immigrants’ lack of, and desire to acquire, Canadian “soft skills” for the work environment. “Business soft skills” was a buzz word at the CIC Conference of Higher-Level Language Training in March 2008. The

meaning of the term has not yet crystallized; in some cases it means communication (nonverbal and verbal) skills, in other cases it seems to be similar to emotional intelligence and in still other cases it refers to knowledge and practice of business etiquette and customs. Because there is interest in this area (an area I have been working in recently), some titles relevant to soft skills – that are not ESL textbooks – are included in a section of the annotated bibliography; most of these works see soft skills more or less as business culture, including communication styles.