Make Learning Last: How Diverse Learners Can Process Their Understanding (Edutopia)

[ELTWeekly Volume 8, Issue 3 | January 18, 2016 | ISSN 0975-3036]

The difficult part of exercise is getting started and sticking to it. Fitness classes are like school classrooms. There are people at different skill levels of strength and conditioning. The instructor’s job is to provide an experience that challenges all participants based on where they are in fitness. Like good classroom teachers, effective fitness instructors incorporate different levels of movements into each activity so that the participants can gauge where they are and what they need to do during the session.

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How and Why Intrinsic Motivation Works (Edutopia)

[ELTWeekly Volume 8, Issue 3 | January 18, 2016 | ISSN 0975-3036]

We are more aware than ever that student motivation and engagement is essential for lasting learning. But there is less discussion of how and why intrinsic motivation works. In fact, when we talk about “motivating students,” we lose sight of the fact that they are already motivated — just often not to do what educators want them to do!

That’s why understanding intrinsic motivation is so important. We need to work with students’ motivational systems more than impose motivation from the outside (i.e. extrinsically).

Deci and Ryan on Intrinsic Motivation

There is an intrinsic need for personal autonomy, self-determination, and to feel that one is choosing one’s behavior, vs. being controlled externally.

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Better together – maximising language use (Cambridge ELT Blog)

[ELTWeekly Volume 8, Issue 3 | January 18, 2016 | ISSN 0975-3036]

Is language learning through immersion always successful? Marcin Lewandowski and Liz Asadi suggest that it can have a negative impact on learning and how students working together as ‘learning buddies’ can counteract this. 

As Krashen intended

London is often a key destination for students who want to learn, improve or practise English. This makes sense. After all, what better place to learn a language than a place where this language is actually spoken by everyone, right?

 

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