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Keeping English Learners Motivated 

By Mary A. Frost 
Georgia State University 
 frost.marya@gmail.com  

 
 

The ability to create dynamic and engaging lessons which are designed to teach content 

as well as language is a unique and challenging skill.  It is sometimes the case that instructors get 

so caught up in the complexities of language and discrete concepts that they forget that 

authenticity in communication and cognitively complex tasks are what make language learning 

engaging for students and motivate them to continue their education. As teachers we always have 

a wide assortment of students in our classes, with wide ranges of aptitudes, L1 proficiencies, 

diverse sociocultural factors, and of course varied levels of motivation to learn. According to 

Dornyei and Csizer (1998) “without sufficient motivation, even individuals with the most 

remarkable abilities cannot accomplish long-term goals, and neither are appropriate curricula and 

good teaching enough to ensure student achievement” (203). And of course, as they also point 

out in their 1998 study, motivation is capable of making up for deficiencies in other areas, such 

as aptitude, when strong enough. Motivation is a crucial element to a student’s successful 

education and teachers need to have a thorough understanding of how best to access that drive 

within their students. 

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mailto:frost.marya@gmail.com


Since it is our job as educators to create measurable levels of learning growth in our 

students, the challenge of motivating learners who lack motivation seems most imperative. In 

addition, motivation is the only characteristic of successful learners upon which teachers may 

have any degree of influence or impact. In Dixon’s 2012 study he identifies motivation as one of 

the four major characteristics of a successful L2 learner. The other three characteristics are 

aptitude, proficiency in L1, and sociocultural factors. Sparks (2009) also found that motivation in 

L2 accounted for a 9% difference in reading comprehension levels and 4% of the variation 

within speaking and listening activities. A clear benefit can be seen in working to increase 

student motivation.  

How can teachers keep students motivated or inspire motivation where there is otherwise 

none? It is easy to say that looking out for students and showing them that their teachers are 

genuinely interested in their wellbeing is one way to increase their desires to achieve in school. 

Most teachers know that looking out for students’ wellbeing is categorically correct behavior, but 

how should teachers accomplish this task? At the right time and place it is certainly beneficial to 

explicitly tell students that instructors value their opinions and care about their experiences, but 

showing is better than telling. In order for instructors to authentically demonstrate sincere 

interest and concern, educators must build opportunities for demonstrating the legitimacy of their 

care into daily interactions by incorporating them into unit designs. In order to craft such a unit, 

teachers need to make sure their designs incorporate two important concepts: authenticity of 

communicative tasks and assessments and a critical pedagogy. Once a unit is designed under this 

lens, teachers must set the scaffolding for success in language learning.  

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Authenticity 

Once the teacher has an idea of the context of the classroom and what content needs to be 

taught, using the strategy of backwards design the teacher should construct opportunities for 

authentic communicative tasks as assessments. While it is fair to say that in every class there is 

going to be a variety of students, some of which lack motivation, it is generally believed that 

students are more motivated when the subject of learning is not perceived to be language, but 

some other content.  According to D’Anglejan and Tucker (1975) “the student can most 

effectively acquire language when the task of language learning becomes incidental to the task of 

communicating with someone…about some topic…which is inherently interesting to the 

student” (284). Using the content as a vehicle for language instruction, teachers can accomplish a 

great deal more because, if correctly designed, the student perception is that there is an actual 

purpose for communication. Similarly, Harper and de Jong (2004) also point out that “because 

ELLs are simultaneously acquiring content and language proficiency, teachers are responsible 

for planning both conceptual and linguistic development for these students in order to meet grade 

level standards” (158). Success in helping English Learners to reach state standards is 

accomplished by integrating content and language teaching so that there is a purpose for 

language application.   

Authentic, communicative assessments will have a practical element to them. Instead of 

assigning a persuasive essay to a student, a more authentic approach would be to have a student 

write a persuasive essay or speech and actually submit it to, for example, the principal or 

whatever other authority might be applicable to the assignment. Teachers can make journaling 

more authentic by responding to student entries. This action changes an exercise into a 

communicative act and student response will become more prolific. When the student knows that 

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the assignment is for something beyond being only read by the teacher for a grade, motivation to 

perform well will increase.  

Making class activities both communicative and authentic can make a drastic difference 

in student motivation as it appeals to student relationships with L2 speakers, L2 community, and 

L2 language. For example, in Daod’s 1998 study, he examined a class of graduate level medical 

students at Damascus University in an English writing class. The students had very low 

motivation and did not consider themselves to be skilled writers, but the students were required 

to take the course to complete their medical degrees. When the teacher began a communicative 

letter exchange project with a university in the United States, students became intensely 

motivated to write. Students drafted essays on a topic of their choosing, but later exchanges 

became about cultural or world issues. Initial problems included sweeping generalizations with 

little support, often criticizing the American government or policies. Students worked carefully 

to learn how to communicate appropriately to their task, incorporating pragmatic knowledge, and 

despite not having any wish to integrate into American society, the class still wished to be 

perceived by the American students as good writers of English. In the end, they had markedly 

improved linguistic self-confidence and interest in writing in English. Also, by interacting with 

actual L2 speakers in authentic forms of communication, the Syrian students’ perceptions of 

Americans and American culture improved. Once a genuine, communicative practice became 

part of their language routine, motivation was enhanced.  

It is also important to note that communicative competency should be stressed over 

discrete grammatical items. A person can have a great deal of knowledge about grammatical 

forms, but be incapable of getting a point across if they cannot comprehend pragmatic functions 

in varied situations (Hymes, 1966; Celce-Murcia, Dornyei, & Thurrell, 1997).  As a teacher with 

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standards to meet, it is easy to become overly concerned with the discrete, “small picture” 

elements of language, but ultimately the purpose of teaching English is for students to use it to 

communicate. Certainly there are times and places for formative discrete grammatical 

assessments, but the ratio of discrete items to communicative “large picture” items should be 

dramatic. Assessments should be conducted on the stressed elements of each task. If the 

emphasis is communicative competence, then the teacher should not nit-pick discrete errors, so 

long as the overall meaning is comprehensible.  

Critical Pedagogy 

Just as authentic forms of communicative assessments increase student motivation, 

designing units with a critical approach will further enhance student interest in the topic and 

therefore increase motivation to communicate. The concept of backwards design is vital in the 

construction of a unit of work. Using this strategy, teachers can design assessments which are the 

types of authentic communicative tasks which motivate students to work and ultimately learn. 

When one considers a puzzle, it helps to have an idea of what the fully constructed picture looks 

like before one starts putting the puzzle together. When the end result can be seen, one can have 

a more informed idea of where to lay pieces and of how different pieces should fit together. This 

concept is the same with constructing a unit and backwards design. When a teacher starts at the 

end and has the final project created first, that teacher can work backward from there and design 

the unit with ideal sequencing and scaffolding in order to facilitate the most effective learning. 

More intentional design choices are possible using this method and one’s overall design will be 

more cohesive.  

Influenced heavily by the writings of Paolo Freire, the concept of a critical pedagogy asks 

students to recognize and deconstruct societal power constructs and hegemony, make 

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connections, and challenge those constructs through their class work and projects. Students must 

recognize how individual experiences and lives connect to larger issues and the social contexts 

within which they are embedded, helping them learn how to think critically. Freire was a critical 

educator, typically recognized as being a part of the social learning perspective. He advocated for 

the practice of students realizing their consciousness and engaging in praxis, or the knowledge 

needed to take action against oppression (Freire, 1970). The banking model of teaching, where 

classes are dominated by teachers and knowledge is deposited into the minds of students is an 

outdated model in which students can have no control of their education. Instead of this banking 

model, students and teachers should interact on a dualistic level, where students have power to 

direct their own learning. A critical approach makes learning more authentic for students because 

they are able to learn and study subjects which interest them. In addition, asking critical 

questions of students trains their brains to make connections in every subject across every walk 

of life. The ability to think critically is an important life skill that is needed in every adult person, 

but it is often overlooked in the classroom. For language minority students in particular, 

analyzing societal power constructs, which often place minorities in areas of marginalization, 

should provide students with avenues for expressing frustration and voices to empower them. 

What steps can teachers take to design their units in a critical way? Teachers should 

consider the issues or history surrounding the literature they plan to use for the unit. For 

example, The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros (1991), a book in which the main 

character, Esperanza, deals with many issues related to the power of language as well as 

struggling with issues of identity, could be related to some much larger issues in history and 

current events. Once the teacher is able to chisel out those core concerns within the literature, the 

teacher can then draw parallels with other pieces of literature, with history, or with current 

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events. For English Learners in particular, the discussion of the power of language is deeply 

rooted in their everyday experience. They will have quite a bit to say on the topic.  

A teacher could incorporate history by discussing the Los Angeles School Blowouts of 

the civil rights movement, which Chicano(a) high school students organized protests against the 

pervading school policy of “English only” education and the filtering of native Spanish-speaking 

students into lower tracks of education. The debate on the benefits or disadvantages of bilingual 

education could be a subject for consideration. Connect it to current events by discussing 

Proposition 203 and the events with educational policy in Arizona.  This is only a sample, but 

explicitly showing students that literature connects to larger issues and concepts will enhance the 

quality and authenticity of assessments, student interest, and ultimately, student motivation.  

Scaffold for Language 

Once the instructor has accomplished the overall concept for a unit, incorporating critical 

ideas and authentic and communicative assessments, the stage is set to get students engaged and 

motivated to work.  However at this point, it is very important that the instructor incorporate 

some scaffolding to support students of various English language proficiencies. There is no 

better way to kill student motivation than to overwhelm (or underwhelm, for that matter) a 

student with language or tasks which exceed reasonable expectations. For motivational purposes, 

to keep students engaged, it is critical that teachers differentiate to the level of the student and 

build a sturdy foundation which supports multiple language levels. Moreover, differentiation 

should be tailored to fit each class. There are so many contexts within which students may be 

learning English and teachers likely have more than one class they teach. Each group may 

require a varied scale of differentiation, depending on who is in the class, but it is important to 

note that most every activity or task can be given a slight change to provide more or less 

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scaffolding. For example, for all assessments which are graded in accordance with a rubric, 

teachers should incorporate a sliding scale based on student language competency scores in each 

of the four language domains. In this way, all students will participate in the same activities and 

tasks, but the language demands and rigor will always correspond to individual student needs. 

All students will be challenged appropriately on both linguistic and cognitive levels while all 

learning the same material.   

In order to scaffold effectively, it is essential that educators have an accurate 

understanding of the science behind second language acquisition. A common misconception of 

second language acquisition, or SLA, is that mere exposure to language, as with first language 

acquisition, will result in language learning (Harper, 2004). However, this is not how SLA 

works. The contexts of second language acquisition are much more varied than those of first 

language acquisition. There are so many different contexts within which a student may be 

learning a second language: as a foreign language in their own country, as an immigrant coming 

to a new country, as a refugee fleeing their home country, as a young learner, as an adult learner, 

and a variety of many other possibilities. So much about second language acquisition is 

dependent on the context of the situation. In each of these contexts, student motivations will have 

vast differences and students’ stages of cognitive development will have major influence on 

learning (Lightbrown & Spada, 2006). It is important that teachers understand the impact that 

age can have on language learning in order to utilize cognitive function of one’s students in the 

best possible way, setting students up for success.  

In the context of the classroom, when considering how to teach a second language to 

one’s students, the age of the students should certainly make an impact on one’s methods, 

approach, and type of scaffolding. Young learners have been shown to “have the ultimate 

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attainment advantage” but older learners demonstrate efficiency and rate advantages” (Dixon, 

2012). In essence, children and adults simply have different tools available to them which 

teachers can utilize in order to scaffold and increase effective learning. It is the teacher’s role to 

highlight student strengths, shape lessons, and scaffold to the needs of the individual to produce 

the maximum benefit for each learner. It is also important to note that the notion that past the age 

of puberty people are incapable of truly acquiring language is proven false every day. The 

difference in child learning and adult learning is simply a difference in learning strengths and 

strategies which are based on age. 

It is important to provide degrees of scaffolding for students so that they not only 

understand the class, but are also challenged enough to grow linguistically (Maybin, Mercer, & 

Stierer, 1992). ESOL teachers must become skilled designers of language objectives for every 

lesson, and those objectives must challenge students’ language skills just enough to help them 

grow.  In areas of the unit where the class is teacher-centered, it is important that the teacher 

tempers his or her language to be comprehensible to the class. While comprehensible input is 

important to consider, the bulk of all classes should be student-centered and focus on 

comprehensible output.  

Comprehensible output is the idea that learning takes place when the speaker encounters 

a gap in linguistic knowledge during communication with another speaker (Swain & Lapkin, 

1995). In contrast to the comprehensible input hypothesis, the comprehensible output hypothesis 

places the emphasis on language production. When a student is using language interactively with 

another speaker, he or she will notice gaps of knowledge once he or she attempts to 

communicate an idea and lacks vocabulary or knowledge of specific grammatical 

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structures (Swain & Lapkin, 1995). Once the student notices these gaps, the student may be able 

to modify his or her output to communicate his idea and learning occurs. Opportunities for this 

type of learning occur most easily within authentic, communicative assessments. The learning 

comes in the making and correcting of one’s own mistakes during language production, but it is 

equally important that the students are able to understand the teacher and one another in class. 

This kind of practice which incorporates the negotiation of meaning between speakers is 

emphasized in an approach which stresses the use of communicative tasks. The fostering of a 

positive and safe learning environment is equally critical, so that students feel unashamed about 

making mistakes in communicative tasks. These mistakes are vital to effective learning.  

When considering issues of communicative competence, it is important for educators to 

consider the differences between BICS and CALPS language. BICS, or Basic Interpersonal 

Communication Skills, refer to basic conversational skills students use to communicate in 

informal exchanges. CALPS, or Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency, is academic 

language used in the context of the classroom as well as basic literacy-related skills, such as 

reading and writing (Cummins, 1986). It is estimated that it takes a student 5-7 years to acquire 

CALPS in a second language if the student is literate in the first language. In cases where the 

student is not literate in his first language, it can take even longer, as the student has no basis for 

comparison when learning (Cummins, 1986). BICS and CALPS are two distinct registers of 

language and it is vital for second language teachers to explicitly teach the differences between 

them, as well as the pragmatic uses of language in various social contexts. ESOL teachers need 

to be particularly cognizant of the structure of their lessons and be certain to incorporate the 

active teaching of pragmatic usages in a variety of registers. 

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For English Learners in particular, a strong foundation in vocabulary is necessary for the 

progression of language development. However, direct instruction in the meaning of words is not 

all teachers need to be providing for their learners. Engaged teachers also provide instruction in 

reading strategies, so that students will have the tools they need to deconstruct, analyze, and 

construct meaning from words independently. It would be an impossible task for a teacher to 

teach every single unknown word in a text as individual units of study. There are too many 

words in the English language. According to Lehr, Osborn, & Hiebert (2004) “no more than 8-10 

words can be taught effectively each week” (3). For this reason, teachers should try to 

simultaneously teach both vocabulary and word-learning strategies, utilizing both oral and 

written language and drawing from both oral and printed registers. As “language acquisition is a 

social activity,” activities based on authentic and purposeful communication should be utilized 

(Tinker Sachs & Ho, 2007: 127). Teachers should work to access students’ schema during 

instruction, incorporating the use of students’ mother tongues, cognates, and dictionaries to 

optimize learning and growth (Lehr, Osborn & Hiebert, 2004). Most of all, tasks for vocabulary 

development should not be isolated “practice” activities without integrated or applicable purpose. 

In the best possible scenario, vocabulary items should be drawn from the content literature so 

that vocabulary scaffolding and communicative practice reinforce one another.  

When teachers work to incorporate all three of these elements in the design of their units, 

and work to motivate English Learners, more effective learning will be the result. During design, 

working from the end is the best way to ensure that the unit is headed in an optimal direction and 

that it can be developed in the most operative sequence with as many parallels to the primary 

content as are applicable to make instructional time engaging.  

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Without a doubt, it is critical that teachers show a personal interest in students outside of 

class time. Be approachable. Allow them the support of their first language where appropriate 

and encourage them to maintain their connection to their first language and heritage. Allow 

students who resist learning English the freedom to express why they feel how they feel. 

Sometimes just the willingness to listen to and discuss the unpopular opinion is enough to 

change a student’s willingness to engage with that teacher in class. Setting a positive example 

with one’s own language and personal presentation can also go a long way toward promoting the 

study of and interaction with the English language and with American culture.  

Additionally, even if a student considered no aspects of English-speaking culture 

admirable in any way, if living in the United States, that student will likely still need some kind 

of relationship with English. Teachers need to help students recognize that it is ok to wear many 

“hats.” They can maintain their pride and identification with their home culture and first 

language while also developing a positive identity as a second language learner. The two are not 

mutually exclusive. 

Above all else what ESOL teachers can give English Learners to increase their 

motivation and ultimately their effective learning is positive, successful experiences with 

communication in English. The way to provide those experiences is by integrating dynamic 

communicative tasks with a critical pedagogy and providing students with the right amount of 

language support in order to succeed. Engage their intellect and students will work to find the 

words. 

  

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References 
 
Celce-Murcia, M., Dornyei, Z., Thurrell, S. (1997).  Direct Approaches in L2 Instruction: A 

Turning Point in Communicative Language Teaching? TESOL Quarterly, 31-1: 141-152. 

Cisneros, S. (1991). The House on Mango Street. New York : Vintage Books. 

Cummins, J. (1986). Empowering Minority Students: A Framework for Intervention. Harvard 

Educational Review, 18-37. 

D’Anglejan A., Tucker, R. (1975). The acquisition of complex English structures by adult 

learners. Language Learning 25-2: 281-296.  

Daoud, S. (1998). How to Motivate EFL Learning and Teaching of Academic Writing by Cross 

Cultural Exchanges. English for Specific Purposes, 391-410. 

Dixon, E. Q. (2012). What We Know About Second Language Acquisition: A Synthesis from 

Four Perspectives. Review of Educational Research, 82:5. 

Dornyei, Z., Csizer, K. (1998). Ten commandments for motivating language learners: results 

from an empiracal study. Language Teaching Research, 203-229. 

Harper, C., De Jong, E. (2004). Misconceptions about teaching English language learners. 

Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 48:2, 152-162. 

Hymes, D. (1966). Two Types of Linguistic Relativity. In W. Bright, Sociolinguistics (pp. 114-

158). The Hauge: Mouton. 

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder. 

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Lightbrown, P. & Spada, N. (2006). How languages are learned. Oxford, England: Oxford 

University Press. 

Maybin, J., Mercer, N. & Stierer, B. (1992). 'Scaffolding' learning in the classroom. In K. 

Norman (Ed.), Thinking Voices: The Work of the National Curriculum Project (pp. 142-

152). London: Hodder & Stoughton for the National Curriculum Council. 

Lehr, F., Osborn, J. & Hiebert, E.H. (2004).  A focus on vocabulary. Research-based practices in 

early learning series.   Honolulu, HI: Pacific Resources for Education and Learning.   

Retrieved August 27, 2011. 

Sparks, R.L., Patton, J. Ganschow, L., & Humbach, N. (2009). Long-term relationships among 

early first language skills, second langauge aptitude, second language affect, and later 

second language proficiency. Applied Psycholinguistics, 725-755. 

Swain & Lapkin. (1995). Problems in Output and the Cognitive Processes They Generate: A 

Step Toward Language Learning. Applied Linguistics, 371-391. 

Tinker-Sachs, G. & Ho, B. (2007). ESL/EFL Cases: Contexts for Teacher Professional 

Discussion. Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong Press. 

 

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