TEFL Awendaw South Carolina

The word ‘motivation' refers to force (positively) someone move. When we motivate ourselves or someone else, we develop encouragement that starts good or stops bad behavior. In other words, motivation is concerned with the factors that stimulate or inhibit the desire to engage in behavior. Plus, as Tan O.S., Parsons, R.D., S.L. & Brown, and D.S. stated when motivation is applied, a person will be automatically energized to satisfy some needs and desires. In short, the person will engage in, or be attracted toward activities that are perceived as having the potential to meet this need or desire. There are four different perspectives that explain motivation such as behavioral, humanistic, cognitive and social perspectives. The behaviorist view of learning says that children will look forward to the next lesson, anticipating another reward when they are rewarded with praise. It is children that must be rewarded for their achievements as this reward is a motivator for their future learning. It is like giving marks in the classroom or giving pluses (+) or minuses (-). These also motivate the students to study harder and do their very best. The humanistic perspective has two theories on motivation. One is Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs which says that when basic psychological needs have been satisfied, efforts are directed towards achieving needs related with safety, love, belonging and self-esteem. When breathing, food, water, sex, sleep, homeostasis and execration are satisfied, the other needs are the focus to be satisfied. Here, it can be inferred that if any of the students have not been basically satisfied, it may be hard for teachers to motivate them. But, bearing this perspective in mind may also be helpful for the teachers to find a better solution for this problem. The second theory is Roger's motivation theory which says that people should listen to their inner voices or innate capacity to judge what is good for themselves rather than relying on feedback from external sources. Therefore, it cannot be easily understood by giving pop-up quizzes, tests, evaluation test to understand whether the students have understood and learned efficiently or not as these external evaluation resources may not be helpful for the students. The cognitive perspective say that students' thought guides their motivation. It basically focuses on students' internal motivation, their beliefs and their extra work to achieve their objectives. It also states that importance of goal setting, planning and monitoring progress are also important factors that lead motivation. This is an ideal way of thinking for adult language learners as they are highly motivated since they set goals and see their progress individually. But for young learners, teacher must set some goals and see their behaviors and developments as they cannot fulfill them individually. At this point, teacher plays an important role of assistance. For example, teachers have some teaching goals/ objectives of lessons, units or subjects to find out how their students' learning developments are and how to boom it. The last one is social learning perspective which states that people who often experience success are more likely to positively value their own competence rather than those who regularly experience failure. If a language learner becomes successful in classroom exams or other exams such as KET, PET, FCE, CAE and other computer based exams, they consider that they will be successful once again, which is inciting for them. In classroom, motivation situation is an important issue that must be always kept in mind. teachers know that some students are easy to teach as they are highly excited about learning and responsive to the teacher's idea. But, on the other hand, some are not highly motivated and have no interest in learning english at all. For those who are unmotivated, teachers should give more importance as they need to try to find a way of teaching the target language in an effective manner. Besides, teachers must go beyond the materials or course books, and must understand the reasons why those students are unmotivated. What I have experienced in my classes before is that some students have some psychological or family problems and it is hard for them to concentrate on learning english. Those students need extra help for themselves and their learning process. teacher must spend extra time talking to those unmotivated students and motivate them to improve themselves for their future lives and stimulate them to learn the target language. For those students, motivation can be provided by giving some useful resources and some visuals about famous people who had some handicaps back in their lives. I firmly assure that this extra help will motivate them to focus on the activities in the classroom. As being the best motivator in the classroom, teachers also should improve themselves by reading extra resources related to professional developments and students' developments to assist their unmotivated students in – out the classroom. In summary, it can be obviously seen that behaviorist perspective is an ideal way to be used in the class for young learners since the students are always in need of reward and praise to encourage themselves and keep on learning in an effective way. It is also necessary that students need to satisfy their basic needs such as food, water, safety, sleep and so on in order to put more on these needs. Furthermore, students have to be brought up a level that they can guide their motivation on their own. Fulfilling these, searching new educational resources and catching up with the global teaching methods and approaches and reading up-to-date educational/teaching journals are musts for teachers.