Motivation in a Teenage Spanish Class

Motivation is a key factor that leads us to explore unknown territories, to face new challenges and to experience feelings. Learning Spanish language can include all of these territories, challenges and new feelings, so motivation plays a huge role..

We usually ask ourselves how can we do to motivate our students, specially those that might be more difficult to us as teachers, like teenagers, students that can have a lack of motivation about learning a second language at those ages, because they are frequently learning a second language because their parents tell them to or because it is a compulsory subject at school. Luckily, in countries like Singapore or Malaysia, the students are the ones that choose the Spanish language on their IB or IGCSE programs.

In order to approach how motivation affects teenager students, “Schumman explains that motivation depends on the student’s evaluation about its own learning experience. It has been proven that having fun while learning turn the experience into memorable, and it involves the students both actively and personally, and that makes them learn and remember better” (Eusebio, 2016).

Herrera and González (2016) stand out the magnitude that motivation has on the learning process at that stage of life. “In teaching foreign languages, motivation is given by what the students can do with that language”. Furthermore, it’s important to have in mind the “sudden changing moods, sometimes with a need of movement, sometimes with extreme apathy” (Martínez, 2016).

The adaptation capacity of the teachers when it comes to understand the specific and individual needs of each student is crucial to make them feel good in class and in order to make them exploit their abilities and explore with the language.

We learn how to ride a bike riding a bike, not by learning one by one the pieces that integrate it. Something quite similar can happen with languages too.