Let’s begin with the picture for this blog. I promise it’s not a beer-related blog. I was going to Italy on holiday for a week with my family recently so I decided to download a popular language-learning app to learn some key phrases in Italian. I was super motivated to learn the phrases I needed to get by for a few days…but unfortunately, that didn’t last long.

We began by learning the Italian for “a man”, “a woman”, “a child”. Now, this is technically what my family is but I’m not sure it was necessarily what I needed at that time. Not to worry though, my motivation was still high so I persevered. Next I learnt to say “a man eats”, “a woman drinks”, “a child speaks”. Again, I definitely expected these three things to occur regularly throughout the week but I just didn’t see myself needing to describe the individual habits of my family to Italian passers-by. My motivation dropped and I abandoned the app.

Instead, I stopped and thought about what my goal was for the holiday. I had very simple needs…you might be able to guess what some of them were from the picture. I wanted to be able to:

• Order beer, wine and juice.
• Order food.
• Ask where the toilets were (very important when travelling with a 6-year-old).
• Ask for the bill.
• Say “please” and “thank you”.

Armed with my goal, I was suitably re-motivated but this time I took my learning into my own hands and with the help of Google Translate and a few Google searches, I had the phrases I wanted. In the end, it was all for naught as I was in an all-inclusive resort and if I tried to speak in Italian to anyone, they just ran away and returned with an English-speaking colleague.

My lack of Italian aside, this experience got me thinking about the impact learner goals have on motivation and engagement. For the most part, when someone is learning a language, they have a goal. Mine was quite narrow but for many they will be broader. Perhaps it will be to study at a university, to travel to a country, to improve job prospects, to migrate, or to converse comfortably with friends or family members. Whatever the goal, this is what drives them. It drives them to pay for a course or a private tutor; sometimes it even drives them to travel at great expense to a country where they can fully immerse themselves in that language. If we can help our learners to see how each lesson chips away at their goal, we can get real engagement.

How can we harness the power of these goals?

I work for EC English, where students are encouraged to set goals before they begin their course. Recently a student set their goal. It was a simple, real-life goal. They wanted to be able to understand football match commentary. The student was coming to our school for a month. Here’s the issue, much like my Italian experience, this student is very quickly going to realise that not all of their lessons are related to football. And, unless they have the good fortune to join a class during the unit on sports and games, it’s quite likely that football will not be mentioned at all in that month. This student’s motivation might not last the first week, let alone the month.

Unless…

Step 1: help the student to break their goal down into meaningful steps to achieve it.

To be able to understand football commentary, one doesn’t just need to know football-related vocabulary. On top of that, if this learner is interested in football, they probably know a hell of a lot more sports language than I do (my friends still get frustrated when I ask if their chosen team has won their sports game). So what else might they need? Perhaps:

• Decoding weak forms & fast speech.
• Understanding intonation and shades of meaning.
• Present tenses (simple, continuous, perfect).
• Will / going to for prediction.
• Certain stock phrases (e.g. “at the end of the day”, “they gave it everything”).

None of which are crazy or out of the ordinary in a general English class.

Step 2: give the student space to reflect

Very often we encourage students to reflect on what they’ve learnt in a lesson or in a week of lessons. We ask them what vocabulary, grammar or skills they’ve acquired. But perhaps we’re missing a step. Perhaps the question is not just “what have you learnt?” but “what have you learnt that will help you to achieve your goal?”.

By keeping our learners’ eyes on their goal and constantly highlighting how what they’re learning in class chips away at that goal, we can harness their motivation and turn it into lesson engagement.

What’s next?

Consider book-ending your lessons, or your week of lessons (or an appropriate number of lessons depending on your context) with this two-step discussion. The first is helping them to refine their goals and the final is asking them what impact your lessons have had on those goals. The resulting conversation can help inform your future lessons as well as ensure engagement from all your students.

And, as the picture shows, I can order beer in Italy…even if I didn’t get a chance to do it in Italian. Next time…