On Friday we had a teacher training session focusing on a chapter of a Jeremy Harmer book about "what makes a good Learner". This looked at not only the student but also the teacher.
One of the most interesting parts, for me, was he talked about the two different groups of motivation and how effective they were. The first was a Inductive, which appears to be the most common. In this case the students wants to know the language for a specific purpose and is interested in the language to achieve this goal. examples include learning English for business, learning English for school, pressure from parents, or other such advantage that knowing the language would provide.
However, Intergrational is where the student has an interest in the culture that the language is from/spoken in and what's to fit in to that culture as well. This is a much more effective motivation and produces much better results in students who want to learn the language.
Taking a personal reflection on my own life, when I was at school and learnt French and German I found both subject very hard to learn. I didn't make much progress until very close to my GCSE when in a desperate attempt to actually get a half decent grade I somehow managed to pull out a C in German (by this point I had already dropped French).
Paradoxically, with Russian I had an interest in the language and culture from when I did a module in Russian politics at university. This continued and then, of course, with arriving in the Ukraine, the motivation was exaggerated further with the desire to be able to communicate and adapt to the society I am in now.
Prior to this I had wondered why, despite Russians complicated cases system and other features, I had found it so much easier to learn than previous languages I had studied. I don't think this is the complete explanation [understanding about my own language and having full submersion have certainly helped too] yet it does seam to go a long way for the explanation.
My personal application from this is going to be trying to provide students with more insights into the different English language cultures to try and activate a stronger intergrational motivation.
There are application of this idea beyond just teaching languages as well.
