I find that I am comparing myself as a language learner to my students. I see myself as one of those students whose listening and reading comprehension as well as pronunciation can be quite good, in contrast to my productive capabilities. As I struggle with Spanish grammar, I am both more sympathetic with their challenges and less understanding of some of their grammatical lapses! For example, after torturing myself with a difficult practice on irregular verbs on the indiana.edu website, I wonder how my native Spanish speakers can have any difficulty at all with Eng. verb endings! On the other hand, I feel the pain of some of my speaking-challenged students who ace the grammar exams, and other fluent ones who don't "apply" my neat little grammar lessons. In addition, I am almost tempted never to complain again about students not following written directions, having realized that I tend to skip right over those in Spanish.
Of course these are not earth-shattering observations, but I find it very useful to be in the students' shoes for a change. As for my own learning Spanish on the computer, I find that interest is the key to motivation. Several obvious factors influence my interest, such as lesson content, length of a passage, video or listening exercise, speaker's accent, and my current mood. We often expect a lot from our students and don't always consider their differing needs, or appreciate the difficulty of tasks.
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2 comments:
i concur with your point on motivation. and i take motivating students as one of my roles. the only problem is that i'm not always right in guessing what i think motivates a class because of the many variables such as not only a class's range of interests and experiences but also each individual's predisposition given the sticks, carrots, and other pressures she/he faces on a given day.
I, like Will, consider motivating students one of my roles as teacher. However, it's something I constantly struggle with! Sometimes I wonder what some of our students are doing in our program, anyway.
This causes me a lot of concern: I want to change things that sometimes don't seem able to be fixed. ("We can only do so much," etc...)
I guess if we are giving them tools to become better learners in the computer lab or classroom, we are doing part of our job of motivating them. That includes trying our best to get the day's lab experience to somehow stick with them. We can't expect every book, exercise, or class to capture all students' attention.
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