Students’ Intrinsic Motivation: The Forgotten Treasure

 

 

Dora Angelina Aruan

 

 

Equipping an English teacher for teaching a multilingual context classroom with skills for designing a good syllabus and lesson plans is not sufficient to guarantee that the class will be a success. Often times, teachers has overlooked the essential of treating the affective aspects of the second language learners and paid more attention to those of the cognitive aspects. The fact that every student is unique and not all of them come to class with the same motivation in learning a second language often hinder the learning process. Teachers easily judge their students as passive and uncooperative. Let alone that teachers often tend to rush the class for the sake of finishing the book and forget the idea of learning as a change of behavior. This paper pinpoints the ultimate existence of teachers’ awareness upon the issue of raising students’ intrinsic motivation.

            Many teaching principles has brought up the above issue, but when it comes to the real process out of the written discussion, teachers find themselves frustrated and have no idea about fixing the problem. What the teachers need are the exact examples of how to increase the students’ intrinsic motivation. The answer would not be a single formula fits for all the problems. However, at least teachers are exposed to the elements of learner’s awareness of need and goals, perceived relevance of the course to achieving goals, maintenance of self-esteem as a person through involvement in decision making, degree of freedom to use preferred learning strategies, and membership of a supportive group leading to increased empathy which at the end reduce inhibitions.

            The elements will be elaborated with exact examples in an Indonesian senior high school context classroom. Parting from the awareness of the discussed elements above, teachers are expected to exercise their ability in sensing their students learning preferences, interests and needs which may spring to the students’ intrinsic motivation and responds well through their materials, techniques, classroom methodology, and roles in the classroom.

 

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Aruan, D. A. (2005, December). Students’ intrinsic motivation: The forgotten treasure. Paper  presented at the 53rd TEFLIN International conference, Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

 

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