Take one dimension of learner differences. What are the most appropriate strategies to address this dimension of difference?

The Importance of Motivation

Literacy plays an important part of the everyday world of adolescents. They read and write emails, search the Internet, send instant messages to each other, read reviews of video games, and post blogs, etc. Yet many school teachers comment that learners do not enjoy reading and writing; more often than not blaming video game culture for the lack of motivation.

Is it the case that learners simply fail to see any relevance in what they are being asked to read and write? To answer this question, teachers could ask themselves questions, such as:

• What evidence do we have of learners’ out of school literacy skills that we can build upon?
• What motivates and engages learners to read and write, and how can we include these types of opportunities in literacy lessons?

To achieve competence in literacy, learners, must be motivated to engage with literacy tasks. In order to motivate learners, teachers should perhaps be making connections between texts and the life experiences of learners to provide them with a purpose for reading.

Cope and Kalantzis (2000, p41) point out literacy teaching and learning needs to change because the world is changing. Here in the 21st Century, reading and writing are interwoven with digital technologies. It is reasonable to say that adolescent learners already know much about multimodal texts from their home experiences. Therefore, teachers need to build on those experiences and the children’s knowledge of multimodality in the classroom by recognizing the relationship between different modes, such as text and image, and sounds and gesture. This would facilitate a more multimodal type of instruction which learners would find more stimulating, worthwhile, and more importantly, motivating. As Kamil (2003, p8) points out: “Motivation and engagement are critical for adolescent readers. If students are not motivated to read, research shows that they will simply not benefit from reading instruction”.

References

Cope, B,Kalantzis, 2000a. Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures. London: Routledge.

Kamil, M.L. 2003. Adolescents and Literacy: Reading for the 21st Century. Washington, DC: Alliance for Excellent Education.