View Content #22022

Kathryn Carpenter is an English instructor/researcher at the Universidad de la Sierra Sur in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Individual Motivating Factors, or IMFs, refer to the personal impetuses or reasons that students are learning language, and change over time. Teachers can tap into individuals’ IMFs to help foster students that are more engaged and motivated. One way that teachers can do this is through assessment, either formal or informal. By taking into consideration students’ IMFs, teachers can both develop assessments that help students pay attention to their own reasons for learning a language, and assess students based on what the teacher knows of these reasons. This can be done while still meeting overall course objectives, and still assessing students on the same language use. Assessment should not always have this individual focus, but should balance students’ individual language foci with the overall course goals and needed assessments. Using this method also supports other best practices in the classroom, such as functional language teaching, differentiated instruction, and formative assessment. However, this technique may be more feasible with students who are not true beginners, and who are high school age or above.

Possible ideas for incorporating students’ Individual Motivating Factors into assessment:

• Assessment based on projects, where students explore language in the way that it is most necessary for them to use while still focusing on the parts of speech that are taught in the classroom.
• Assessments that include research on some aspect of language or culture, which allows students to produce assessed language that is based on exploration of a type of language/region/culture that is relevant to them.
• Assessing students on the way they use the speech and apply it to a new topic or theme, while allowing them to pick the topic or theme. This can apply to writing or speaking.
• Allowing students to pick from different options that make the most sense to them and their future language needs, while still assessing the same basic language. For a wide-open example of this including a rubric, see today's Activity of the Week.
• Allowing students to pick the formality/style of the speech that they are using, or otherwise modify the speech to fit into their future language needs and usage contexts, while still using the same overall language. This may include allowing code-switching, slang, hyper-formal language, different dialects/accents, or other types of non-traditional classroom language.