First published by The Vocabula Review
Before I understood its imperfections, English was faultless. I was a happy follower of the prescriptive rules of English grammar who adhered to all the newest trends in grammar and never made an editorial move without consulting publications such as Warriner's English Composition and Grammar or The Chicago Manual of Style. The first twinges of doubt came at the beginning of the 1970s when feminists began to grumble about sexist language. Although I had been vaguely aware that expressions such as "All men are created equal" and "Everyone is entitled to his day in court" didn't apply directly to me, I didn't fault the language or its speakers for these innocent oversights. What surprised me, however, was the choler inspired in otherwise intelligent people when women began to suggest we take another look at our English language, particularly at its systems of nomenclature and pronoun selection.
Traditionalists were unabashed in their sarcasm and condescension, lamenting the growing number of out-of-control women suffering from an infliction they gleefully termed "pronoun envy" (qtd. in Martyrna 483). It took editors at the New York Times a full ten years before they accepted Ms as an honorific; it took about the same amount of time to convince speakers of American English that androcentric words such as "man" and "mankind" could easily be replaced with the more inclusive "humanity" or "humankind." Martyna summarizes the problem in a 1980 article:
"Time calls it "Ms-guided," a syndicated columnist "linguistic lunacy." TV Guide wonders what the "women's lib redhots" with "the nutty pronouns" are doing. A clear understanding of the sexist language issue continues to elude the popular press. The medium is not alone in its misunderstanding (482)."
However, feminists and others sensitive to the power of language found support in theories put forward by linguists such as Sapir and Whorf; that is, language plays a role in shaping people's attitudes, even their worldview. American women had started to demand the same freedoms men had long enjoyed, and English would soon feel the burn of the intensifying social revolution. Bate finds that social and linguistic changes cannot be separated and that "interpersonal communication is the primary mediator between large-scale social processes and individual behavior" (148). Ultimately, the lexicon of American English began to change. And while we still hear an occasional "lady fireman" or "male stewardess," most Americans routinely use terms such as firefighter, letter carrier, police officer, flight attendant, even if the mental image inspired by the terms remains gender-specific. It's a start.
________________
"Everyone get back to their seats!"
Fifth-grade teacher to students
________________
So What's the Problem?
One of the surprise downsides of triumphing in the battle for nonsexist language is the dilemma created by the fact that English doesn't have a "grammatically acceptable" gender-free third-person singular pronoun to reference a person. This doesn't particularly matter in speech because native speakers of English automatically rely on singular they (their, them) as the pronoun of choice; for example:
I don't care what everyone else is doing; they're not me.
If someone calls, tell them I'm out.
But singular they can be problematic in writing, partly because the act of writing makes one reluctant to break prescriptive rules. And, strict grammarians—especially those who control the citadels of formal education and publishing—dictate that the epicene pronoun they references plural, not singular, antecedents.
In the good old days—between the mid-eighteenth century and the late 1960s; specifically, before women insisted on being included in the human race—writers employed the allegedly generic he to fill the void. In the name of "correct" grammar and without so much as a murmur of rebellion, we embraced the idea that he meant she as well as he and rejected the notion that feminine gender mattered. Thus embracing the ideal of genderless he, we didn't even smile at the absurdity of a sentence such as, "No person shall be forced to have an abortion against his will" or "Man, being a mammal, breast-feeds his young" (qtd. in Meyers 228, 489).
Speakers of English, on the other hand, have been using singular they since the days of Middle English. And writers—even those most glorified in English literature—used the term long before grammarians decided to stuff our brawny English corpus into a tight Latinate corset. Yet, despite valiant and consistent attempts by grammarians to convince speakers of English to accept generic he, singular they continues to thrive in speech. As far back as 1978, Martyna found that though generic he is used more often in writing, singular they is used more often in speech (137).
Meyers notes that in written documents, "generic pronoun choices [he or she and singular they] have failed thus far ... to gain approval" (228). Yet, although her 1989 study indicates that the majority of adult college writers—47 percent of 392 subjects ranging in age from 22 to 64—choose generic he, a strong 44 percent prefer singular they. Although she doesn't argue specifically against generic he, she notes that "our encounters with 'he' rarely take place in clearly generic contexts" (488). Instead, generic he appears alongside and in the vicinity of sex-specific he, which renders it ambiguous.
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"Everyone's having the time of their lives at Mammamia's."
Advertisement for a NYC restaurant
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Singular They, Trippingly on the Tongue
Beyond the world of linguistics, it isn't generally known that singular they was once accepted usage in English writing and speech. There is no evidence that speakers of Middle English and early Modern English used gender-inclusive he as we know it today (Hook 333). In fact, Bodine claims, "English has always had ... linguistic devices for referring to sex-indefinite referents, notably the use of singular 'they' (their, them)" (168). Examples of such usage can be found on Henry Churchyard's Linguist Page, a website that applauds singular they's long tradition in English literature.
1535 FISHER Ways perf. Relig. ix. Wks. (1876) 383: "He neuer forsaketh any creature vnlesse they before haue forsaken them selues."
1749 FIELDING Tom Jones VIII. Xi: "Every Body fell a laughing, as how could they help it."
1759 CHESTERF. Lett. IV. ccclv. 170: "If a person is born of a gloomy temper ... they cannot help it."
1835 WHEWELL in Life (1881) 173: "Nobody can deprive us of the Church, if they would."
1858 BAGEHOT Lit. Stud. (1879) II. 206: "Nobody fancies for a moment that they are reading about anything beyond the pale of ordinary propriety."
Churchyard's site includes quotations from the works of Jane Austen, William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, and other shining lights of English-language literature. Here are only a few of the hundreds listed:
King James Version (Authorized Version) translation of the Bible, Philippians 2:3:
"Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves. "
Shakespeare:
"God send every one their heart's desire!"[Much Ado About Nothing, Act III Scene 4]
There's not a man I meet but doth salute me,As if I were their well-acquainted friend. [Comedy of Errors, Act IV Scene 3]
Thackeray:
"No one prevents you, do they?"
George Eliot:
"I shouldn't like to punish anyone, even if they'd done me wrong."
Walt Whitman:
"... everyone shall delight us, and we them."
Elizabeth Bowen:
"He did not believe it rested anybody to lie with their head high ... "
Lawrence Durrell:
"You do not have to understand someone in order to love them."
Doris Lessing:
"And how easy the way a man or woman would come in here, glance around, find smiles and pleasant looks waiting for them, then wave and sit down by themselves."
C. S. Lewis:
"She kept her head and kicked her shoes off, as everybody ought to do who falls into deep water in their clothes." [Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Chapter I]
Oscar Wilde:
"Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes."
The Old-Time Grammarians
According to historical linguistics, most speakers of English allowed their language to develop unimpeded during its first 800 or 900 years. No one systematically tried to whip it into submission during its evolution from Old English to Middle English to Modern English. During this period, Englisc underwent enormous changes that included an influx of thousands of Latinate words, diphthongization, vowel shifts, epentheses, metatheses, as well as syntactic and pronunciation adjustments that make it impossible for modern speakers to understand early incarnations of the language. We all know language must change; and it normally does so, says Holmes, because of variations in pronunciation and meaning (195). As the change catches on, more and more people use it, and the variation becomes the norm—that is, until the language changes again.
The grammarians of eighteenth-century England may not have been the first to try to stay the normal course of language development, but they certainly were among the most successful. They seem to have purposefully narrowed the original definition of they by tossing out its singular referents and by proscribing expressions such as him or her and he or she, deeming these constructions ungainly. Their reasons, argues Bodine, had roots in the grammarians' androcentric worldview (171). She cites the following passage from Wilson's Arte of Rhetorique, first published in 1553 (171):
"Some will set the Carte before the horse, as thus. My mother and my father are both at home, even as thoughe the good man of the house ware no breaches or that the graye Mare were the better Horse. And what thoughe it often so happeneth (God wotte the more pitte) yet in speaking at the leaste, let us kepe a natural order, and set the man before the woman for maners Sake."
This thinking was supported by grammarians such as Wilson, Poole, Kirby, and others—all males—who ardently campaigned for the supremacy of the masculine gender. They declared indefinite subjects such as everyone, everybody, a person, anyone were to be treated as masculine singular; and singular they was dutifully silenced in all the best circles. They won—at least in grammar texts.
While Bodine maintains that "the prescriptive grammarians' attack on singular 'they' was socially motivated" (166), Pinker claims grammarians were motivated by economic greed. During the late eighteenth century, people began to strive for better living conditions; and one way to realize this goal was to become formally educated, which meant the upwardly mobile were obliged to copy the language of the moneyed classes. Since the grammarians of the day had succeeded in convincing educators that Latinate English was preferable to the English everyone was already speaking and writing, they felt it their duty to write new grammar texts, and publishing houses were happy to churn them out. Huge profits were realized each time a new text hit the bookstands, and so grammarians had to raise the bar each time they sat down to write a new how-to grammar book. Pinker calls this "the scandal of the language mavens":
"[A]s the competition became cutthroat, the manuals tried to outdo one another by including greater numbers of increasingly fastidious rules that no refined person could afford to ignore"(386).
In truth, the lower classes were not upwardly mobile. Uneducated and too engrossed in trying to survive, the unprivileged had almost no hope of penetrating society's upper crust. And the upper-crustics made sure the lower classes were distinguished not only by their poor clothing and empty pockets but also by their unselfconscious way of speaking. Zuber and Reed argue, "In eighteenth-century England, the codification of English grammar helped to maintain class distinctions" (517). It's likely that this desire to maintain power was the real reason behind the proliferation of new grammar texts during this period. By rejecting singular they and other forms of common speech, those already in power were able to preserve the status quo of class privilege as well as male dominance.
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"And God will open His loving arms to anyone who wants eternal love. He will give them everlasting joy; He will give them the only true love they will ever know."
TV evangelist
________________
Spoken and Written Language
Singular they and he or she were put out to pasture by grammarians. But even an Act of Parliament in 1850 England, which banned official use of the expression he or she in favor of generic he, didn't affect the spoken language (Bodine 173). Literature is never written in the spoken language, and rules of writing are always guided by prescription. Ong notes, "Without writing, words as such have no visual presence.... They have no focus and no trace ... not even a trajectory" (574). So, we're likely to be far more relaxed in speech than in writing. For example, the writing systems of the various Chinese and Arabic idioms don't reflect the speech of their readers. There was a time when there was no formal written Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, or French; documents were written in Latin, the language of their origin. In fact, literature has often been the definitive element that divides dialect from language. The Tuscan dialect became the national language of Italy simply because it was the first dialect of the Italian peninsula to boast a body of literature—and its greatest writer, Dante Alighieri, is now known as the Father of the Italian language.
In most languages where writing exists, there's a distinct code of behavior for written language, especially in academic and formal texts. And most people find it difficult, if not impossible, to defy the code. Even a dancing-along-the-warpath anti-prescriptivist such as Pinker follows the very rules he so deplores. In a chapter entitled "The Language Mavens," he uses the expression "his or her speech" (383) as he lambastes prescriptivists for rejecting a perfectly good term such as singular they. "Indeed, they has the advantage of embracing both sexes and feeling right in a wider variety of sentences" (392). If he really eschewed the dictates of prescriptivism, he would have remembered to use singular they before launching his offensive.
________________
"Everyone has the right to their own opinion. If they don't like it [porn TV], they don't have to watch it."
Porn industry CEO
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How We Say We Talk
To find out what people say about their own use of singular they in conversation, I asked thirty-five people to fill in the blanks of fourteen sentences that called for a third-person singular pronoun. Thirty people responded—twenty-five teachers, three writers, one copyeditor, and one secretary. Though asking people to write down what they think they say might seem contradictory, I was really interested in how they responded to the following statement:
Everyone saw me before I saw _____." (Choose a third-person pronoun.)
In one of Pinker's invectives, he predicts the average prescriptivist—or, to use his terminology, "Mr. Smartypants"—will "squirm" when asked to finish this sentence (391). On the contrary, even respondents who had gone out of their way to present themselves as grammatically aware had no problem filling in the blank with them:
Everyone saw me before I saw them.
In the sentence, "Someone left _______ books on the desk," nineteen people reported they would use their, five said they preferred his, three indicated they would use his or her, and two suggested they would use her. In real conversation, of course, one rarely says, "Someone left his or her books on the desk." Therefore, we can surmise that respondents are disinclined to report their actual language use and are more concerned about "correctness," even when responding anonymously. In fact, nine of the thirty respondents sent me notes citing the rule that indefinite pronouns, as antecedents, don't require use with gender-specific pronouns since they are already gender-neutral. Two respondents asked if this were a test of some sort, and five wanted to know if they had "passed." One non-respondent said she had opted not to answer because she didn't think her answers would help me understand language use among the general population. But even with all this resistance and uncertainty, twenty-seven of the thirty people who did respond had no problem reporting their preference for singular they: "Everyone saw me before I saw them."
Another telling aspect of the questionnaire was the participants' willingness to use the seemingly impossible singular reflexive, themself. Twenty-two respondents used this construction to complete the following sentence:
It's annoying when someone constantly pats ____________ on the back. (Choose a third-person reflexive pronoun.)
Their response indicates that, at least in spoken language, singular they is the epicene pronoun of choice as it functions equally well as for both single and plural referents. Clearly, the days of generic he are numbered, even in written language:
It's annoying when someone constantly pats themself on the back.
________________
"Every village is going to have their own code."
Ron Gibbons, pool salesperson
________________
Other Findings
Khosroshaha found that men are likely to use generic he in writing, whereas women prefer to use the expression he or she. She asked fifty-five first-year psychology students to read five paragraphs about a gender-neutral subject referred to as he, he or she, or they. The students were then asked to draw pictures of the subjects. If the drawings were sex-indefinite, students were asked to give their portraits a name. In addition, Khosroshaha reviewed papers the students had already written for their classes to determine whether they usually used what she calls traditional language—that is, generic he—or reform language—that is, he or she. She found that men and women who used traditional language drew masculine figures, and reform-language women drew female figures (261).
Cameron notes, "those who prefer [he or she constructions] usually justify it by arguing that neutral or genderless terms are often covertly interpreted as masculine, so that if your aim is to ensure that women are included you must mention them explicitly" (156). And, since men have less of a problem using generic he than do women, we can conclude that generic he isn't generic at all; on the contrary, it's blatantly gender exclusive. And, since men are more aware of what Tannen calls "the power dynamics of interaction" (246), they are more likely to reject the expression he or she in favor of he, at least in written discourse.
Foertsch and Gernsbacher found that singular they is just as effective a pronoun as he or she and generic he when the gender of the antecedent is unknown. They note that the only problem with singular they is that it is not prescribed; however, their 1997 study found that its proscription has no bearing on understanding. In this study, they asked people to read and interpret sentences whose subjects were either definite (teacher, truck driver) or indefinite (someone, he or she, a person). They found that subjects read and understand sentences containing singular they just as well as sentences that used pronouns referencing a stereotypical antecedent (cf. http://www.geocities.com).
________________
"What do we do when someone comes to us with a trauma? If we think we can help them, we help them."
Judith Taber PT, medical writer
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Natural vs. Grammatical Gender
There is a tendency among those of us who are not linguists to believe that grammar must adhere to a mathematical sort of logic. As someone once said, "If I hadn't believed it, I wouldn't have seen it"; that is, logic is a variable existing in the mind's eye of the beholder. Hook observes that in some cultures, it's logical to refer to people in terms of their age rather than their gender. In Japan, for example, "one would not ask 'Where do you think he [single male individual] is living now?' but rather 'Where do you think under [individual under 30] is living now?' (... over refers to someone over that age)" (332). White notes that "Uralic languages such as Estonian, Finnish, and Hungarian work without sexual gender" (51). In Romance languages such as Spanish, Italian, and French, possessive pronouns don't indicate the gender of the possessor. In German, a girl or unmarried women is referred to as "it." Modern English has never had a gender-specific third-person-plural pronoun. But as far as English-language speakers are concerned, they have always had the gender-free third-person-singular and plural pronoun, they. Singular they wasn't considered numerically discordant until old-time grammarians decided our language had to adhere to the "logic" of Latin as well as to the equally dubious "logic" of male dominance.
________________
"Shame on you for thinking a wrestling promoter is gonna pull back, cause they're not gonna do it."
TV discussion about World Wide Wrestling
________________
The Problem with Singular They
The main problem with singular they is that people are reluctant to disobey the dictates of what is generally perceived as grammatical correctness. This is not necessarily because they agree with a particular rule; it's because they don't want their readers to think they don't know the rule. Writers are hesitant to use a term such as singular they because their readers might think it's a mistake or, worse, a display of ignorance. Pinker faults those he calls language mavens, "people who set themselves up as language experts" and make other people feel intimidated about using their own language. He writes, "A linguist's question to an informant about some form in [their] speech ... is often lobbed back with the ingenuous counterquestion 'Gee, I better not take a chance; which is correct?'" (388).
Garner ponders the question of singular they in The Dictionary of Modern American Usage:
"[Noun-pronoun disagreement] is either one of the most frequent blunders in modern writing or a godsend that allows us to avoid sexism" (147). But he also suggests that writers avoid using singular they, if possible; mainly because "some readers may doubt your literacy" (147).
________________
"The way you treat your child writes on the tablet of who they are."
Dr. Phil, TV psychologist
________________
Examining the Rule
We have seen that prescriptive rules don't necessarily rely on logic, and they're sometimes borrowed from dissimilar language systems. As Pinker points out, Julius Caesar and other speakers of Latin couldn't have split an infinitive or ended a sentence with a preposition if their lives had depended on it (386); but English speakers commit these linguistic infractions all the time, and they're often punished when they do so in writing. The generic-he rule applies, say prescriptivists, because the pronoun they references a plural antecedent; an assertion, argues Bodine, that loses on at least three fronts. First, as we now know, examples of singular they can be found in ancient texts, as in the following example from 1526 (cf. Churchyard's website):
Yf a psalme scape ony persone, or a lesson, or else yt. they omyt one verse or twayne.
Second, we have no trouble accepting the pronoun you for both single and plural antecedents. And, since singular and plural they existed peacefully alongside singular and plural you until the late eighteenth century, the sudden proscription of singular they seems to have been inspired by other motives. Bodine calls those motives sexist:
"If the definition of 'they' as exclusively plural is accepted, then 'they' fails to agree with a singular, sex-indefinite antecedent by one feature—that of number. Similarly, 'he' fails to agree with a singular, sex-indefinite antecedent by one feature—that of gender" (170).
For some reason, in English, gender can be seen only in the third-person singular. If, in the name of "logic," prescriptivists wish to make sure the numbers concord, there’s no reason not to make the genders do the same. Having argued against he or she—which isn't too terrible, since the masculine gender still gets to go first—they proscribed singular they and embraced not-so-generic he. And, except for a few valiant voices, until the 1970s, most English-language writers, editors, educators, and journalists accepted the rule.
________________
"If you're cheating on your lover and you want to confront them on the Ricki Lake Show, call 1 800 GO-RICKI."
________________
Searching for the Impossible
Linguists say we cannot artificially import or create function words. They're probably right, for untold numbers of people have tried to find a solution to the pronoun problem in English, and they have all failed. Almost as soon as the new rules went into effect, someone came up with the epicene pronouns hiser and himer. Since then, many more have tried and just as many have belly flopped. Some examples include en, thon, es, he'er, ha, himorher, hse, tey, na, hisorher, ey, ae, et, it, sheshe, hann, herm. While these doomed neologisms may have been unsuccessful because they sound contrived, it's more likely they floated to the bottom because English-language speakers already have a pronoun with which they're quite happy—singular they.
Going Around and Coming Around
As dictionary editors become more descriptivist than prescriptivist, they attempt to define words as they are used, not how grammarians say they're supposed to be used. The 1984 edition of Webster's New World Dictionary defines they as, "The persons, animals, or things previously mentioned; also used with a singular antecedent (as everybody, somebody, everyone)." The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, published in 2002, defines they as "People in general; any persons, not including the speaker. ... In relation to a singular noun or pronoun of undetermined gender, he or she."
Manuals of style are usually, and predictably, more reluctant to shed linguistic norms. The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage (1999) commands, "he or she may be used as a last resort to avoid an unwanted assumption of maleness or femaleness in a general reference" (153). But its editors adamantly refuses to admit singular they: "Do not apply they to singular antecedents ... even when the aim is to avoid assuming maleness or femaleness" (330).
Supporters of singular they have at least one esteemed ally, albeit a temporary one. A courageous editor of The Chicago Manual of Style (14th edition) writes:
"The University of Chicago Press recommends the revival of the singular use of they and their, citing, as do they, its venerable use by such writers as Addison, Austen, Chesterfield, Fielding, Ruskin, Scott, and Shakespeare" (2.98, note 9). [NB: The editor calls singular they a revival, not an innovation.]
Alas, the editors are considering a retraction. In response to a query about their endorsement of singular they, at least one editor took a cautious step back into the secure arms of prescriptivism:
"[T]here is some regret at having written it and we may change our minds in the next edition. I personally would rather avoid this usage, but occasionally it's so difficult to find a way around it that I take comfort in this note of approval and rather dread its removal. I should add, however, that we will do almost anything to avoid using "s/he." (cf. http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/cmosfaq/cmosfaq.Pronouns.html)
In his 1988 edition of English Composition and Grammar, Warriner allows for informal usage of singular they, pointing out the preposterousness that can result from pronoun-antecedent agreement. "This form [singular they] is becoming increasingly popular in writing as well and may someday become acceptable as standard written English" (524).
________________
"[My work] is kind of like grabbing the viewer by the neck and shaking them."
Jerome Tupa, artist, priest
________________
Conclusion
Daday argues in favor of singular they by using the same reasoning we apply to collective-noun usage. Specifically, in American English, collective nouns such as audience, family, group, class are treated as singular, "but only if the group acts as a unit" (3). When we think of a unit in terms of its members, it's treated as plural, as in the following quotations:
Give the couple something they'll use every day. (HSN salesperson)
Has the public been misled by the MTA? You bet they have. (NYC Comptroller Thompson).
The central question in the matter of singular they is that of authority. Who has the power to decide how people should use their language? We have seen that history is not on the side of those who would ban singular they from written texts; neither is logic; nor is majority rule. The authority lies in the hands of those who control the press, including publishers and editors of textbooks, style manuals, and dictionaries, popular and specialized journals of all kinds. But as power is given, it can be taken away. As Meyers writes, "[T]he need for a third-person gender-neutral singular pronoun has proven a thorny, but ultimately solvable problem" (419). The majority of speakers of English prefer singular they, and many writers consciously or subconsciously use the term. Generic he is becoming increasingly old-fashioned, and constructions such as he or she or s/he often prove unwieldy, especially in speech. We're left with two choices: import or create a brand new epicene pronoun or legitimize the one native speakers of English have been using for over 1000 years—singular they.
________________________________________
"One can draw their own conclusion about the incident."
Publicist for brawling pop star
________________
References
Bate, Barbara. "Nonsexist Language Use in Transition." Journal of Communication. 28.1 (Winter 1978): 139-149.
Bodine, Ann. "Androcentrism in Prescriptive Grammar" in The Feminist Critique of Language: A Reader, Ed. Deborah Cameron. London: Routledge, 1992, 164-186.
Cameron, Deborah. Verbal Hygiene. London & New York: Routledge, 2002.
Daday, Judith. "The Trouble with They." Reprinted from Syntax in the Schools, 15:2 (http://nweb.pct.edu/homepage/staff/evavra/ENL111/Syntax/SMU01.htm).
Garner, Bryan A. A Dictionary of Modern American Usage. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Henry Churchyard's Linguistic Page (http.//www.crossmyt.com).
Holmes, Janet. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, 2nd edition. Longman: London, 2000.
Hook, Donald D. "Toward an English Epicene Pronoun." IRAL 24.4 (November 1991): 331-337.
Meyer, Charles F. "Language Change and Gender." American Speech. 75.4 (Winter 2000): 418-420.
Martyna, Wendy. "Beyond the 'He/Man' Approach: The Case for Nonsexist Language." Signs: 5.3 (Spring 1980): 482-493.
_______. "What Does 'He' Mean?: Use of the Generic Masculine." Journal of Communication. 28.1 (Winter 1978): 131-138.
Meyers, Miriam Watkins. "Current Generic pronoun Usage: An Empirical Study." American Speech 65:3 (1990): 228-236.
Ong, Walter J. "Some Psychodynamics of Orality." Linguistics at Work: A Reader of Applications. Ed. Dallin D. Oaks. London: Heinle & Heinle, 2001, 574-593.
Pinker, Steven. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. New York: Perennial Classics, 1994.
Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 5th edition. 2 vols. London: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Siegal, Allam M. and William G. Connolly. The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage. New York: Random House, 1999.
STEP: Scripts: Psycholinguistics: Foertsch and Gernsbacher, 1997
(http://step.psy.cmu.edu/scripts/Linguistics/Foertsch1997.html).
Tannen, Deborah. "The Power of Talk: Who Gets Heard and Why?" Linguistics at Work: A Reader of Applications. Ed. Dallin D. Oaks. London: Heinle & Heinle, 2001, 242-259.
The Chicago Manual of Style, 12th edition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Warriner, John E. English Composition and Grammar. Orlando: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988.
Webster's New Word Dictionary. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984.
White, Keith. "Choice Pronouns." English Today 9.2 (April 1993): 51-54.
Zuber, Sharon and Ann M. Reed. "The Politics of Grammar Handbooks: Generic He and Singular They." College English 55:5 (September 1993): 515-529.
Thursday, September 28, 2006
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
MOTIVATION UNDER THE MICROSCOPE
In an attempt to make education accessible to all students, especially to those who express the least desire for it, educators have embraced and employed theories of motivational learning that have transformed US classrooms from bastions of pedantry and bolted-down desks into centers of inquiry and discussion. Academic motivation is a pedagogical hot topic that has forced educators to redefine education, intelligence, and teaching. For better or worse, it has also provoked an unending debate about the relative effects of two types of motivation—intrinsic and extrinsic—vis-à-vis their influence on students, teachers, curricula, and, of course, the almighty state-mandated tests. Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations are complex psychologically, socially, and emotionally charged incentives to undertake a task or meet a goal. In the theater of pedagogy, they seem to take turns playing protagonist and antagonist or, more dramatically, hero and villain, winner and outcast. What is sometimes lost in the drama is the consideration that they are bound to each other in varying degrees; indeed, it’s often difficult to distinguish one from the other.
DEFINING MOTIVATION
Before beginning a discussion about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, it’s necessary to agree on a definition of motivation. Oxford defines it as (1) “the action or an act of motivating something or someone; (2) the conscious or unconscious stimulus, incentive, motive, etc, for action towards a goal, esp. as resulting from psychological or social factors.” In terms of education, motivation might be defined as the act of inspiring a student to study or the act of bribing a student to memorize information. In its noun form, it might be defined as a feeling or thought strong enough to make one do something requiring effort. Educational writer Alfie Kohn remarks that when educators talk about motivation, “they [really] mean compliance” (Brandt 1), a system of ruses intended to seduce or threaten students to do something they don’t want to do. Barnett and Mosquera take an opposing, more idealistic view of motivation as the “active, open, and responsive communication between people who have chosen a mutual goal” (288). Finally, a group of third- and fourth-grade ESL students defines motivation as “a sort of engine that gets you going and keeps you going.”
A THEORY OF THE MOTIVATIONAL INQUIRY
Although motivation as a philosophical question has been publicly mulled over since the days of Socrates and Plato, it was not until the twentieth century that psychologists and educators scooped it up to bolster theories of need, learning, education, and pedagogy. The motivational movement came of age during the 1930s; thus, one can surmise that its popularity had little to do with motivation per se and everything to do with keeping kids in school. The Depression Era job market couldn’t have borne a new wave of teenage job seekers, so it became important to keep students in the public school system as long as possible, at least through high school.
The thirties also saw Jean Piaget’s entrance on the stage of psychological inquiry with La naissance de l’intelligence chez l'enfant, which introduced the concept that children move through predictable stages of cognition by exploration and experimentation. On the heels of Piaget, Maria Montessori’s The Secrets of Childhood (1936) argued that adults are obligated to guide children into their “true selves,” Skinner’s The Behavior of Organisms (1938) posited that all learning is reward driven, and Dewey’s Liberalism and Social Action (1935) demanded that traditional and progressive educators re-evaluate pedagogy in terms of the whole person. Hoy writes, “Dewey emphasized that while [the] ideal [of the connection between democracy and education had] been significantly realized, it [should] be constantly reassessed in light of political, economic, and social change”( 57). As these new ideas made their debuts in arenas of psychological and pedagogical investigation, educators scurried to discover more effective teaching practices.
Post-World War II welcomed a new age of technology, so students had to be encouraged to stay in school in order to learn new skills that would ease them into technology-related jobs. Russia’s triumph in launching Sputnik in 1957 sent US officials in a mad dash for second prize in the space race, and the repercussions were felt immediately in classrooms across the United States. Why Johnny Can’t Read (Flesch 1955) became the bible of educational reformers, who suddenly had a cause, a motivation, to whip American students into scholars capable of surpassing their Russian counterparts. The stakes were raised during the late seventies and early eighties with the naissance of information technology; now students had to be convinced to stay in school and continue on to college in order to learn the skills of the new Information Age.
Economic progress brought about social changes. Since families were no longer struggling to rise to higher economic strata, they had no reason to push their children to do better than they had done. Formal education ceased to be a luxury or privilege; it became a right. People who had never known deprivation assumed that an overabundance of food and goods were the norm; thus, they had no reason to strive for anything. And, as television became an intrusive, permanent houseguest in homes across the United States, books closed, spontaneous games came to a halt, and school became the place you went when you weren’t watching television. At the same time, the new immigrants were non-Europeans whose cultures, religions, and languages didn’t allow for a smooth assimilation into North American culture; indeed, immigrants now came to US shores, not to become Americans, but to find work that would enable them to support their families in their home countries.
Obstacles to Understanding Motivation
Out of this came an increasingly urgent need to motivate students not just to stay in school, but to enjoy their stay. Making school “fun” for children became the theme of new pedagogical thinking. However, educators weren’t able to overcome some motivational obstacles. First, in order to be motivated to achieve goals deemed acceptable by society, one must share the beliefs and understand the mores of that society. Convincing students to strive toward academic excellence is an uncertain battle if book learning is tantamount to their idea of sacrilege, if writing Standard English involves denying their culture, if mastery of critical thinking makes them traitors to their traditions. Fishman states, “Schools only really succeed in teaching those things for which there is ample out-of-school support” (1). In regard to language, Fishman says, immigrant students “have often been given a cruel Hobson's choice: either to be ‘American’ and give up their languages, or to maintain their languages and be un-American’” (Interview, also cf. Crawford 240). Second, to apply the Maslovian Hierarchy of Needs, we can assume that hungry students are motivated to eat; abused children are motivated to defend themselves, homeless students are motivated to find shelter. If students’ basic human needs are eluding them, no motivational strategy will get them to do last night’s homework or force them to stay awake during phonemic awareness. Although some researchers challenge Maslow’s Hierarchy as unscientific or outdated (cf. Kiel 1), they haven’t yet accused hunger or abuse or homelessness of being non-factors in academic achievement and success. Not only is academic motivation inseparable from culture (Wlodkowski and Ginsberg 313), it is inseparable from the most basic human needs.
Finally, motivation is not a constant. Linnebrink and Pintrich note that “students are motivated in multiple ways, but their motivation can vary depending on the situation or context in the classroom or school” (31). This is true whether the motivation is intrinsic or extrinsic. Although it’s unlikely that educational theorists will ever construct a definitive model of motivation, their research has forced educators to rethink what some consider “a deterministic, mechanistic, and behavioristic orientation toward human motivation” (Wlodkowski and Ginsberg 313).
TYPES OF MOTIVATION
Educational psychologists and researchers agree that there are different types of motivation “based on the different reasons or goals that give rise to an action” (Ryan and Deci 53). And while it’s not always easy to determine the inspiration for every action, researchers reference two major types of motivation—intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation is often regarded as the ideal, and extrinsic is often regarded as the weaker, less appealing sibling. Nonetheless, the connection between the two is undeniable.
Intrinsic Motivation
As its name implies, intrinsic motivation is internal motivation. Intrinsically motivated people learn for the sake of learning; they are driven to act, to achieve, to excel, to participate because it seems natural. Artists, writers, musicians, dancers are intrinsically motivated to create; polyglots are intrinsically motivated to learn languages; avid readers are intrinsically motivated to read. Researchers such as Renniger (45) describe intrinsic motivation in Csikszentmihalyian terms as a state in which one is completely immersed in an activity and experiences a “flow” of awareness that transcends rewards, time, and place. This is the state of preschool childhood when children are driven by their inherent curiosity to explore, question, experiment. No one tells them to do these things; they do them because they have a drive to do them. Indeed, Cordova notes, “There are, it appears, no preschool children with ‘motivational deficits’” (715).
Amabile has developed an intrinsic motivation hypothesis of creativity (90), which states, “Intrinsic motivation is a crucial determinant of creativity across different domains for different types of subject populations” (115). Obvious as this seems, it is a relatively new and creative idea that certainly supports the concept of the student-centered classroom and denies the theory supported by behaviorists and the likes of Francis Bacon and John Locke that one is born a tabula rasa, a blank slate, and all learning is the result of outside stimuli—thinking that dominated classroom instruction well into the twentieth century.
Extrinsic Motivation
Extrinsic motivation is a method for getting people to do what you want them to do by offering rewards or punishments such as gold stars, stickers, candy, praise, good grades and bad grades. Extrinsic motivation supposedly prompts people to work for goals that come with perks—a “good citizen” award in kindergarten, class monitor in grade school, the “right” friends in high school, a car at graduation, dinner with the “right” people as well as power and money during adulthood. Extrinsically motivated people never work for the sake of working; without the accoutrements, they would have no reason for doing so.
Some researchers have determined that extrinsic motivators chip away at intrinsic motivation. Deci was among the first to insist that extrinsic awards “undermine intrinsic motivation” (Rewards Controversy 1). Many researchers agree that extrinsic rewards redirect a student’s attention away from intrinsic satisfaction, because they “induce external pressure that leads a person to change the perceived locus of causality of an intrinsically interesting activity to the external reward” (Esser et al. 406). This strips a person’s sense of autonomy and weakens the feeling of competence necessary for intrinsic motivation to continue its vital flow (cf. Ryan and Deci 58). Another problem with extrinsic motivators, says Deci, is that they render tasks performance-oriented; that is, rewards are contingent on successful performances (cf. Esser et al. 407), which diminishes the internal satisfaction engendered by the process of the task. It’s hard to be lost in the flow of creativity when one’s focus is on someone else’s idea of a successful performance.
MOTIVATION AND ACADEMICS
For all the soap boxing, bickering, and dissenting, research supports a multifaceted, humanitarian approach to motivationally oriented pedagogy. Of course, people are not intrinsically or extrinsically motivated to do all things all the time. And, no one will dispute, much of what students are expected to do to succeed in school doesn’t spring from a hotbed of fascination. So, teachers feel compelled to find ways to motivate their students using extrinsic motivators—seducers and punishments, if you will—that will get their students to the finish line intact, reasonably well educated, and enthusiastic about learning. On the other hand, research also shows that when the major motivation for completing a task is entirely unconnected with the task, students lose their sense of competence and autonomy. What, after all, does candy have to do with spelling?
Easy Ways to Undermine Intrinsic Motivation
Ryan and Deci (59) point out that educators, parents, and others in authority have the power to destabilize children’s intrinsic motivation by limiting their choices and opportunities via external motivators, all of which take the form of commands:
Rewards—Get 100 percent on your spelling test and you’ll get a candy bar!
Threats—Get 100 percent on your test, or else!
Deadlines—Hurry up and study for the spelling test!
Directives—Don’t study for arithmetic; study for that spelling test!
Competition Pressure—Don’t get beaten out by the other students!
Rewards
Hill agrees with Kohn that “reward schemes can actually be de-motivating” (304), especially when a project or task involves creativity. Unfortunately, grades come under the heading of rewards; and while teachers are still universally bound to issue them, it’s well known that grades are subjective judgments, especially of creativity. Even the seemingly innocuous gold star can be de-motivating because it detracts from the learning activity, which makes the activity seem like a chore. The Chinese say that dessert is the memory of a satisfying meal (Lee 322); I have a saying that a gold star is the memory of an excellent learning activity.
Threats
Threats focus student attention on the threat, not on the work at hand. According to Kohn, threats and rewards “are both ways of manipulating behavior … forms of doing things to students” (1). It’s not difficult to figure out that threats don’t change behavior. All you have to do is check out the rate of recidivism in prisons or analyze the bell curve of academic performance. The well-my-parents-and-teachers-whipped-my-butt-and-look-how-good-I-turned-out philosophy begs the question, “If threats work so well, why are so many students stuck in neutral?”
Deadlines and Directives
Deadlines and directives, we say, are the way of the western world. Children have to learn to meet deadlines and take direction, or they’ll never make it in the working world. However, students respond to deadlines and directives the same way they respond to threats and rewards; that is, they perceive them as controllers (Ryan and Deci 59). Amabile et al. concur:
With rewards, deadlines, and evaluation, there is some external goal to be attained, some goal for which the task is the means. Subjects' perceptions of self-determination under these circumstances are manipulated through presentation of the task as the means to a goal (169).
However, when students are given a choice of deadlines or directives, they’re more likely to retain their “sense of self-determination” (Amabile et al. 260) as well as their intrinsic motivation.
Competition
We are a nation that glorifies competition, a people who genuflect before manufactured deities frolicking on the stage of successful competition. It doesn’t matter which competition the icons have won—best looking, roundest breasts, most flagrant bad boy, biggest money-maker, most ghoulish murderer—they’re winners in our book. The advertising industry would fizzle into a drainage ditch if competition weren’t the mainstay of our economy. Yet, for all our adulation for the biggest, best, meanest competitors, researchers have determined that the pressures of competition undermine intrinsic motivation. Anglin and Robson cite Clinkenbeard’s study:
The use of competition as a motivator has been studied for over seventy years. Pamela Clinkenbeard authored a study entitled, "Effects of Competitive and Individualistic Success on Problem Solving and Motivation". According to Clinkenbeard some investigators have found that competition is inferior to virtually any kind of cooperative small group structure in reaching important affective goals of education. In addition, competitive goal structures in classrooms, with their emphasis on social comparison and normative evaluation, have been shown to have negative effects not only on the self-worth of, but also the achievement of most students (Clinkenbeard, 1984).
Vansteenkiste and Deci agree. Their study of the effects of competition on losers concludes:
… it seems that trying to win competitions and competitively contingent rewards is becoming more and more prevalent in modern culture, yet it appears that a focus on winning may indeed be counter-productive at least with respect to intrinsic motivation for the target activities. If, instead of emphasizing winning above all else, participants in activities and observers of the activities focused more on good performance than on winning, the results for the participants’ motivation is likely to be far more positive (26).
How to Facilitate Motivation
On the flipside, teachers have the power to encourage students without resorting to approaches that have a history of undermining intrinsic motivation. B.J. Wise (3) has constructed a “formula for motivation”:
Challenging, prestigious tasks + good instruction + success + recognition =
Motivation to try more difficult tasks
The formula, which proved overwhelmingly successful when implemented at an elementary school under Wise’s principalship, is based on the idea that if we understand what makes students misbehave—that is, amotivated or unmotivated—we will learn how to turn that behavior around.
Researchers have studied many factors that facilitate motivation, such as self-efficacy, task goals, shifting nexuses of causality, autonomy, learning styles, and contextualization. And, although we may never realize all the intricacies of what drives students to learn, each area of research contributes to a more comprehensive knowledge of the dynamics of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations.
Self-Efficacy
Linnebrink and Pintrich point to students’ self-efficacy—their beliefs about their ability to learn or complete a task—as a major factor in student motivation (24). In short, if I don’t think myself capable of memorizing your spelling list or reading your book, all the gold stars in the academic constellation won’t convince me to try; I will remain inert in my safe amotivational corner of the universe. And, in some cases, students might be justified in this self-assessment (cf. Bandura 1977). I’m not going to take a calculus class or choose mathematics for my major if I can’t conquer the mysteries of long division. What students do need are opportunities to succeed (Linnebrink 25). These are available through scaffolding—guided reading, cloze paragraphs, taxonomies—and through portfolios, projects, class discussions, and other academic endeavors that rely on and value students’ background knowledge.
Task Goals
The Renaissance School in Indianapolis makes sure its students experience self-efficacy and competence by requiring all high-school students to undertake an apprenticeship in their chosen area of strength (Bolanas 3). In addition to increasing self-efficacy, apprenticeships are positively related to task goals—doing a task for the sake of the task—rather than performance goals, which are not unlike introjected regulations studied by Ryan and Deci. Increasing or nurturing students’ self-efficacy builds their confidence, which, in turn, increases their intrinsic motivation to experience flow, and perhaps to shine. Bempechat writes, “Factors such as confidence and expectations for performance are in many cases better predictors of school achievement than IQ or standardized achievement tests” (4).
Shifting Nexuses of Causality
The fact is, it is sometimes impossible to distinguish intrinsic motivation from extrinsic motivation, because the “nexus of causality” (cf. Ryan and Deci 56) and “locus of causality” (Esser et al. 406) don’t remain constant:
A person might originally get exposed to an activity because of an external regulation (e.g., a reward). And (if the reward is not perceived as too controlling) such exposure might allow the person to experience the activity’s intrinsically interesting properties, resulting in an orientation shift. Or a person who has identified with the value of an activity might lose that sense of value under a controlling mentor and move ‘backward’ into an external regulatory mode (Ryan and Deci 63).
Ryan and Deci describe four forms of external motivation that exert varying degrees of control over students (61):
External Regulation — Reading for the gold star because the gold star is pretty
Introjected Regulation — Reading for the gold star so all my friends see that I have a gold star
Regulation through Identification— Reading for the gold star because teachers tell me it will help me become a better reader and writer
Integrated Regulation— Reading for the gold star because I have learned to value it as instrumental to my goal of becoming an educated individual
Although these forms are not developmental, or even necessary stepping stones, one nexus of causality can easily lead to another. That is, “While I like this gold star, I just love the story I had to read to get the star; maybe I’ll sneak a look at another story.” On the other hand, extrinsic forms of motivation, especially external and introjected regulations, can also inflict amotivation: “I’m so over gold stars, I’m not reading this stuff.” Or, as in the cases of identification and integration, they can foster behavior that is intrinsically motivated: “The book was so fascinating, I got lost in it.”
The point is, there is a connection, a nexus, between each of the motivational forms. Therefore, intrinsic motivation can be either damaged or further inspired by its connection to extrinsic forms of motivation, and extrinsic forms of motivation can be either rendered absurd or inspired by their connection to intrinsic motivation. Armed with this knowledge, educators can develop curricula and lesson plans that facilitate intrinsic motivation and give students a sense of autonomy in their academic lives.
Autonomy
Students must feel that they have some measure of autonomy, or they shut down, and there is nothing a teacher can do to light a motivational fire under them. One of the problems with extrinsic motivators is that they rob students of their sense of autonomy—the assurance that they’re capable of functioning without outside controlling forces. Alderman cites deCharms’ description of autonomy as “two ends of a continuum … pawn and origin:
To feel like an origin is to feel like one has the freedom and competence to make choices. To feel like a pawn is to feel controlled by external forces in the environment. deCharms pointed out that we cannot be origins in all situations; students have required courses and teachers have prescribed curriculums. Motivationally, the most important aspect is the extent to which one feels like an origin or pawn (181).
While no one, not even a teacher, can always be the origin, everyone has a need to make choices and take initiatives (Alderman 181). If I try to control your academic behavior by cramming a candy bar into your mouth every time you take a spelling test, you’ll soon balk at both the candy and the spelling test. Researchers agree, there’s a connection between students’ lack of autonomy and amotivation; specifically, students who lack self-efficacy and also feel their teachers are trying to control them tend to become amotivated in the classroom.
Clearly, no teacher can force students to be motivated, but there is much teachers can do to create an environment that fosters autonomy by giving choices to students, taking turns with them in the roles of origin and pawn, and welcoming their diverse ways of absorbing information and viewing the world.
Multiple Intelligences and Learning Styles
Cordova examined the roles of contextualization, personalization, and provision of choices as enhancers of intrinsic motivation in students. There was a time when it was normal pedagogical practice to introduce new material out of context; and to a certain extent, some teachers still do this, especially in teaching reading through the back door of phonemic awareness (cf. Krashen). According to Cordova, this is one reason children seem to cut their ties with intrinsic motivation once their enter school. Most educators agree that material should always be presented in context and in a way that is suited to each student’s learning style and intelligence and that provides them with choices in regard to how they wish to absorb that material. Recent research supports differentiated instruction, which involves “the realization that all learners vary in their readiness, interests, and learning profiles” (Hess 1).
Again, we can look to Gardiner’s taxonomy of multiple intelligences to discover ways to nourish the natural intrinsic motivation inherent in all students. Cordova writes, “Presenting learning activities … in meaningful contexts of some inherent appeal to children should have significant beneficial effects on children’s intrinsic motivation and learning” (2).
CONCLUSION
With all the problems of our educational system, there is no denying that pedagogical and psychological research has led to productive changes in teaching methodologies and strategies. Curricula have become more diverse and universal, and students from all social and economic strata are welcomed and nurtured in more humanitarian, safer academic environments. Researchers are still investigating models of cognitive learning and how they interplay with intrinsic and extrinsic motivations.
At the same time, schools are microcosms of society; and we live in a society where plagiarism is rampant, cheating to get ahead is acceptable, and how you look or how much money you have can determine whether you’ll live out your dreams in the gallery, the orchestra, or at center stage. All children are born with a natural, thriving motivation to live with every fiber of their being. They don’t need rewards or threats or coaxing to realize their inherent drive to learn. Educators and researchers are compelled to investigate two questions: Why do children tend to lose that internal drive? What can educators do to see that their academic journey is safe, rewarding, challenging, and enlightening? By questioning our traditional approaches to teaching—from gold-starring to grading to adorning the finish line with bright lights and fanfare—we have taken the first steps in answering these essential questions.
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DEFINING MOTIVATION
Before beginning a discussion about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, it’s necessary to agree on a definition of motivation. Oxford defines it as (1) “the action or an act of motivating something or someone; (2) the conscious or unconscious stimulus, incentive, motive, etc, for action towards a goal, esp. as resulting from psychological or social factors.” In terms of education, motivation might be defined as the act of inspiring a student to study or the act of bribing a student to memorize information. In its noun form, it might be defined as a feeling or thought strong enough to make one do something requiring effort. Educational writer Alfie Kohn remarks that when educators talk about motivation, “they [really] mean compliance” (Brandt 1), a system of ruses intended to seduce or threaten students to do something they don’t want to do. Barnett and Mosquera take an opposing, more idealistic view of motivation as the “active, open, and responsive communication between people who have chosen a mutual goal” (288). Finally, a group of third- and fourth-grade ESL students defines motivation as “a sort of engine that gets you going and keeps you going.”
A THEORY OF THE MOTIVATIONAL INQUIRY
Although motivation as a philosophical question has been publicly mulled over since the days of Socrates and Plato, it was not until the twentieth century that psychologists and educators scooped it up to bolster theories of need, learning, education, and pedagogy. The motivational movement came of age during the 1930s; thus, one can surmise that its popularity had little to do with motivation per se and everything to do with keeping kids in school. The Depression Era job market couldn’t have borne a new wave of teenage job seekers, so it became important to keep students in the public school system as long as possible, at least through high school.
The thirties also saw Jean Piaget’s entrance on the stage of psychological inquiry with La naissance de l’intelligence chez l'enfant, which introduced the concept that children move through predictable stages of cognition by exploration and experimentation. On the heels of Piaget, Maria Montessori’s The Secrets of Childhood (1936) argued that adults are obligated to guide children into their “true selves,” Skinner’s The Behavior of Organisms (1938) posited that all learning is reward driven, and Dewey’s Liberalism and Social Action (1935) demanded that traditional and progressive educators re-evaluate pedagogy in terms of the whole person. Hoy writes, “Dewey emphasized that while [the] ideal [of the connection between democracy and education had] been significantly realized, it [should] be constantly reassessed in light of political, economic, and social change”( 57). As these new ideas made their debuts in arenas of psychological and pedagogical investigation, educators scurried to discover more effective teaching practices.
Post-World War II welcomed a new age of technology, so students had to be encouraged to stay in school in order to learn new skills that would ease them into technology-related jobs. Russia’s triumph in launching Sputnik in 1957 sent US officials in a mad dash for second prize in the space race, and the repercussions were felt immediately in classrooms across the United States. Why Johnny Can’t Read (Flesch 1955) became the bible of educational reformers, who suddenly had a cause, a motivation, to whip American students into scholars capable of surpassing their Russian counterparts. The stakes were raised during the late seventies and early eighties with the naissance of information technology; now students had to be convinced to stay in school and continue on to college in order to learn the skills of the new Information Age.
Economic progress brought about social changes. Since families were no longer struggling to rise to higher economic strata, they had no reason to push their children to do better than they had done. Formal education ceased to be a luxury or privilege; it became a right. People who had never known deprivation assumed that an overabundance of food and goods were the norm; thus, they had no reason to strive for anything. And, as television became an intrusive, permanent houseguest in homes across the United States, books closed, spontaneous games came to a halt, and school became the place you went when you weren’t watching television. At the same time, the new immigrants were non-Europeans whose cultures, religions, and languages didn’t allow for a smooth assimilation into North American culture; indeed, immigrants now came to US shores, not to become Americans, but to find work that would enable them to support their families in their home countries.
Obstacles to Understanding Motivation
Out of this came an increasingly urgent need to motivate students not just to stay in school, but to enjoy their stay. Making school “fun” for children became the theme of new pedagogical thinking. However, educators weren’t able to overcome some motivational obstacles. First, in order to be motivated to achieve goals deemed acceptable by society, one must share the beliefs and understand the mores of that society. Convincing students to strive toward academic excellence is an uncertain battle if book learning is tantamount to their idea of sacrilege, if writing Standard English involves denying their culture, if mastery of critical thinking makes them traitors to their traditions. Fishman states, “Schools only really succeed in teaching those things for which there is ample out-of-school support” (1). In regard to language, Fishman says, immigrant students “have often been given a cruel Hobson's choice: either to be ‘American’ and give up their languages, or to maintain their languages and be un-American’” (Interview, also cf. Crawford 240). Second, to apply the Maslovian Hierarchy of Needs, we can assume that hungry students are motivated to eat; abused children are motivated to defend themselves, homeless students are motivated to find shelter. If students’ basic human needs are eluding them, no motivational strategy will get them to do last night’s homework or force them to stay awake during phonemic awareness. Although some researchers challenge Maslow’s Hierarchy as unscientific or outdated (cf. Kiel 1), they haven’t yet accused hunger or abuse or homelessness of being non-factors in academic achievement and success. Not only is academic motivation inseparable from culture (Wlodkowski and Ginsberg 313), it is inseparable from the most basic human needs.
Finally, motivation is not a constant. Linnebrink and Pintrich note that “students are motivated in multiple ways, but their motivation can vary depending on the situation or context in the classroom or school” (31). This is true whether the motivation is intrinsic or extrinsic. Although it’s unlikely that educational theorists will ever construct a definitive model of motivation, their research has forced educators to rethink what some consider “a deterministic, mechanistic, and behavioristic orientation toward human motivation” (Wlodkowski and Ginsberg 313).
TYPES OF MOTIVATION
Educational psychologists and researchers agree that there are different types of motivation “based on the different reasons or goals that give rise to an action” (Ryan and Deci 53). And while it’s not always easy to determine the inspiration for every action, researchers reference two major types of motivation—intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation is often regarded as the ideal, and extrinsic is often regarded as the weaker, less appealing sibling. Nonetheless, the connection between the two is undeniable.
Intrinsic Motivation
As its name implies, intrinsic motivation is internal motivation. Intrinsically motivated people learn for the sake of learning; they are driven to act, to achieve, to excel, to participate because it seems natural. Artists, writers, musicians, dancers are intrinsically motivated to create; polyglots are intrinsically motivated to learn languages; avid readers are intrinsically motivated to read. Researchers such as Renniger (45) describe intrinsic motivation in Csikszentmihalyian terms as a state in which one is completely immersed in an activity and experiences a “flow” of awareness that transcends rewards, time, and place. This is the state of preschool childhood when children are driven by their inherent curiosity to explore, question, experiment. No one tells them to do these things; they do them because they have a drive to do them. Indeed, Cordova notes, “There are, it appears, no preschool children with ‘motivational deficits’” (715).
Amabile has developed an intrinsic motivation hypothesis of creativity (90), which states, “Intrinsic motivation is a crucial determinant of creativity across different domains for different types of subject populations” (115). Obvious as this seems, it is a relatively new and creative idea that certainly supports the concept of the student-centered classroom and denies the theory supported by behaviorists and the likes of Francis Bacon and John Locke that one is born a tabula rasa, a blank slate, and all learning is the result of outside stimuli—thinking that dominated classroom instruction well into the twentieth century.
Extrinsic Motivation
Extrinsic motivation is a method for getting people to do what you want them to do by offering rewards or punishments such as gold stars, stickers, candy, praise, good grades and bad grades. Extrinsic motivation supposedly prompts people to work for goals that come with perks—a “good citizen” award in kindergarten, class monitor in grade school, the “right” friends in high school, a car at graduation, dinner with the “right” people as well as power and money during adulthood. Extrinsically motivated people never work for the sake of working; without the accoutrements, they would have no reason for doing so.
Some researchers have determined that extrinsic motivators chip away at intrinsic motivation. Deci was among the first to insist that extrinsic awards “undermine intrinsic motivation” (Rewards Controversy 1). Many researchers agree that extrinsic rewards redirect a student’s attention away from intrinsic satisfaction, because they “induce external pressure that leads a person to change the perceived locus of causality of an intrinsically interesting activity to the external reward” (Esser et al. 406). This strips a person’s sense of autonomy and weakens the feeling of competence necessary for intrinsic motivation to continue its vital flow (cf. Ryan and Deci 58). Another problem with extrinsic motivators, says Deci, is that they render tasks performance-oriented; that is, rewards are contingent on successful performances (cf. Esser et al. 407), which diminishes the internal satisfaction engendered by the process of the task. It’s hard to be lost in the flow of creativity when one’s focus is on someone else’s idea of a successful performance.
MOTIVATION AND ACADEMICS
For all the soap boxing, bickering, and dissenting, research supports a multifaceted, humanitarian approach to motivationally oriented pedagogy. Of course, people are not intrinsically or extrinsically motivated to do all things all the time. And, no one will dispute, much of what students are expected to do to succeed in school doesn’t spring from a hotbed of fascination. So, teachers feel compelled to find ways to motivate their students using extrinsic motivators—seducers and punishments, if you will—that will get their students to the finish line intact, reasonably well educated, and enthusiastic about learning. On the other hand, research also shows that when the major motivation for completing a task is entirely unconnected with the task, students lose their sense of competence and autonomy. What, after all, does candy have to do with spelling?
Easy Ways to Undermine Intrinsic Motivation
Ryan and Deci (59) point out that educators, parents, and others in authority have the power to destabilize children’s intrinsic motivation by limiting their choices and opportunities via external motivators, all of which take the form of commands:
Rewards—Get 100 percent on your spelling test and you’ll get a candy bar!
Threats—Get 100 percent on your test, or else!
Deadlines—Hurry up and study for the spelling test!
Directives—Don’t study for arithmetic; study for that spelling test!
Competition Pressure—Don’t get beaten out by the other students!
Rewards
Hill agrees with Kohn that “reward schemes can actually be de-motivating” (304), especially when a project or task involves creativity. Unfortunately, grades come under the heading of rewards; and while teachers are still universally bound to issue them, it’s well known that grades are subjective judgments, especially of creativity. Even the seemingly innocuous gold star can be de-motivating because it detracts from the learning activity, which makes the activity seem like a chore. The Chinese say that dessert is the memory of a satisfying meal (Lee 322); I have a saying that a gold star is the memory of an excellent learning activity.
Threats
Threats focus student attention on the threat, not on the work at hand. According to Kohn, threats and rewards “are both ways of manipulating behavior … forms of doing things to students” (1). It’s not difficult to figure out that threats don’t change behavior. All you have to do is check out the rate of recidivism in prisons or analyze the bell curve of academic performance. The well-my-parents-and-teachers-whipped-my-butt-and-look-how-good-I-turned-out philosophy begs the question, “If threats work so well, why are so many students stuck in neutral?”
Deadlines and Directives
Deadlines and directives, we say, are the way of the western world. Children have to learn to meet deadlines and take direction, or they’ll never make it in the working world. However, students respond to deadlines and directives the same way they respond to threats and rewards; that is, they perceive them as controllers (Ryan and Deci 59). Amabile et al. concur:
With rewards, deadlines, and evaluation, there is some external goal to be attained, some goal for which the task is the means. Subjects' perceptions of self-determination under these circumstances are manipulated through presentation of the task as the means to a goal (169).
However, when students are given a choice of deadlines or directives, they’re more likely to retain their “sense of self-determination” (Amabile et al. 260) as well as their intrinsic motivation.
Competition
We are a nation that glorifies competition, a people who genuflect before manufactured deities frolicking on the stage of successful competition. It doesn’t matter which competition the icons have won—best looking, roundest breasts, most flagrant bad boy, biggest money-maker, most ghoulish murderer—they’re winners in our book. The advertising industry would fizzle into a drainage ditch if competition weren’t the mainstay of our economy. Yet, for all our adulation for the biggest, best, meanest competitors, researchers have determined that the pressures of competition undermine intrinsic motivation. Anglin and Robson cite Clinkenbeard’s study:
The use of competition as a motivator has been studied for over seventy years. Pamela Clinkenbeard authored a study entitled, "Effects of Competitive and Individualistic Success on Problem Solving and Motivation". According to Clinkenbeard some investigators have found that competition is inferior to virtually any kind of cooperative small group structure in reaching important affective goals of education. In addition, competitive goal structures in classrooms, with their emphasis on social comparison and normative evaluation, have been shown to have negative effects not only on the self-worth of, but also the achievement of most students (Clinkenbeard, 1984).
Vansteenkiste and Deci agree. Their study of the effects of competition on losers concludes:
… it seems that trying to win competitions and competitively contingent rewards is becoming more and more prevalent in modern culture, yet it appears that a focus on winning may indeed be counter-productive at least with respect to intrinsic motivation for the target activities. If, instead of emphasizing winning above all else, participants in activities and observers of the activities focused more on good performance than on winning, the results for the participants’ motivation is likely to be far more positive (26).
How to Facilitate Motivation
On the flipside, teachers have the power to encourage students without resorting to approaches that have a history of undermining intrinsic motivation. B.J. Wise (3) has constructed a “formula for motivation”:
Challenging, prestigious tasks + good instruction + success + recognition =
Motivation to try more difficult tasks
The formula, which proved overwhelmingly successful when implemented at an elementary school under Wise’s principalship, is based on the idea that if we understand what makes students misbehave—that is, amotivated or unmotivated—we will learn how to turn that behavior around.
Researchers have studied many factors that facilitate motivation, such as self-efficacy, task goals, shifting nexuses of causality, autonomy, learning styles, and contextualization. And, although we may never realize all the intricacies of what drives students to learn, each area of research contributes to a more comprehensive knowledge of the dynamics of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations.
Self-Efficacy
Linnebrink and Pintrich point to students’ self-efficacy—their beliefs about their ability to learn or complete a task—as a major factor in student motivation (24). In short, if I don’t think myself capable of memorizing your spelling list or reading your book, all the gold stars in the academic constellation won’t convince me to try; I will remain inert in my safe amotivational corner of the universe. And, in some cases, students might be justified in this self-assessment (cf. Bandura 1977). I’m not going to take a calculus class or choose mathematics for my major if I can’t conquer the mysteries of long division. What students do need are opportunities to succeed (Linnebrink 25). These are available through scaffolding—guided reading, cloze paragraphs, taxonomies—and through portfolios, projects, class discussions, and other academic endeavors that rely on and value students’ background knowledge.
Task Goals
The Renaissance School in Indianapolis makes sure its students experience self-efficacy and competence by requiring all high-school students to undertake an apprenticeship in their chosen area of strength (Bolanas 3). In addition to increasing self-efficacy, apprenticeships are positively related to task goals—doing a task for the sake of the task—rather than performance goals, which are not unlike introjected regulations studied by Ryan and Deci. Increasing or nurturing students’ self-efficacy builds their confidence, which, in turn, increases their intrinsic motivation to experience flow, and perhaps to shine. Bempechat writes, “Factors such as confidence and expectations for performance are in many cases better predictors of school achievement than IQ or standardized achievement tests” (4).
Shifting Nexuses of Causality
The fact is, it is sometimes impossible to distinguish intrinsic motivation from extrinsic motivation, because the “nexus of causality” (cf. Ryan and Deci 56) and “locus of causality” (Esser et al. 406) don’t remain constant:
A person might originally get exposed to an activity because of an external regulation (e.g., a reward). And (if the reward is not perceived as too controlling) such exposure might allow the person to experience the activity’s intrinsically interesting properties, resulting in an orientation shift. Or a person who has identified with the value of an activity might lose that sense of value under a controlling mentor and move ‘backward’ into an external regulatory mode (Ryan and Deci 63).
Ryan and Deci describe four forms of external motivation that exert varying degrees of control over students (61):
External Regulation — Reading for the gold star because the gold star is pretty
Introjected Regulation — Reading for the gold star so all my friends see that I have a gold star
Regulation through Identification— Reading for the gold star because teachers tell me it will help me become a better reader and writer
Integrated Regulation— Reading for the gold star because I have learned to value it as instrumental to my goal of becoming an educated individual
Although these forms are not developmental, or even necessary stepping stones, one nexus of causality can easily lead to another. That is, “While I like this gold star, I just love the story I had to read to get the star; maybe I’ll sneak a look at another story.” On the other hand, extrinsic forms of motivation, especially external and introjected regulations, can also inflict amotivation: “I’m so over gold stars, I’m not reading this stuff.” Or, as in the cases of identification and integration, they can foster behavior that is intrinsically motivated: “The book was so fascinating, I got lost in it.”
The point is, there is a connection, a nexus, between each of the motivational forms. Therefore, intrinsic motivation can be either damaged or further inspired by its connection to extrinsic forms of motivation, and extrinsic forms of motivation can be either rendered absurd or inspired by their connection to intrinsic motivation. Armed with this knowledge, educators can develop curricula and lesson plans that facilitate intrinsic motivation and give students a sense of autonomy in their academic lives.
Autonomy
Students must feel that they have some measure of autonomy, or they shut down, and there is nothing a teacher can do to light a motivational fire under them. One of the problems with extrinsic motivators is that they rob students of their sense of autonomy—the assurance that they’re capable of functioning without outside controlling forces. Alderman cites deCharms’ description of autonomy as “two ends of a continuum … pawn and origin:
To feel like an origin is to feel like one has the freedom and competence to make choices. To feel like a pawn is to feel controlled by external forces in the environment. deCharms pointed out that we cannot be origins in all situations; students have required courses and teachers have prescribed curriculums. Motivationally, the most important aspect is the extent to which one feels like an origin or pawn (181).
While no one, not even a teacher, can always be the origin, everyone has a need to make choices and take initiatives (Alderman 181). If I try to control your academic behavior by cramming a candy bar into your mouth every time you take a spelling test, you’ll soon balk at both the candy and the spelling test. Researchers agree, there’s a connection between students’ lack of autonomy and amotivation; specifically, students who lack self-efficacy and also feel their teachers are trying to control them tend to become amotivated in the classroom.
Clearly, no teacher can force students to be motivated, but there is much teachers can do to create an environment that fosters autonomy by giving choices to students, taking turns with them in the roles of origin and pawn, and welcoming their diverse ways of absorbing information and viewing the world.
Multiple Intelligences and Learning Styles
Gardiner has been instrumental in changing the way educators have expanded their thinking about learning and intelligence. No longer are we locked into a narrow view of intelligence as a one-dimensional phenomenon involving the ability to decipher and memorize text; no longer do we expect our students to pirouette on the academic stage with exactly the same speed and dynamic. Intelligence has many forms, and people have many ways in which they express intelligence and absorb knowledge. By eschewing old-fashioned models of intelligence, learning, and motivation, all students have the opportunity to dance under the bright lights. Gardiner specifies eight forms of intelligence, each of which is consistent with a different learning style.
Linguistic intelligence: Lots of reading and writing
Mathematical Intelligence: Bring on the reasoning problems
Spatial: Responds to reading, puzzles, drawing
Kinesthetic: Loves theater, crafts, hands-on activities
Musical: Welcomes rhythm, sounds, memorization
Interpersonal: Lots of group work, great communicators
Intrapersonal: Strong in self-awareness, goal setting, reflection
Naturalist: Open the doors to the outdoors
Teachers can tailor their curriculum and lessons to address their students’ intelligences and nurture their intrinsic motivation as they allow them to make choices and develop a sense of autonomy. The Internet abounds with resources for teachers interested in motivating their students via multiple intelligences and learning styles.
Contextualization, Personalization, and Choices
Linguistic intelligence: Lots of reading and writing
Mathematical Intelligence: Bring on the reasoning problems
Spatial: Responds to reading, puzzles, drawing
Kinesthetic: Loves theater, crafts, hands-on activities
Musical: Welcomes rhythm, sounds, memorization
Interpersonal: Lots of group work, great communicators
Intrapersonal: Strong in self-awareness, goal setting, reflection
Naturalist: Open the doors to the outdoors
Teachers can tailor their curriculum and lessons to address their students’ intelligences and nurture their intrinsic motivation as they allow them to make choices and develop a sense of autonomy. The Internet abounds with resources for teachers interested in motivating their students via multiple intelligences and learning styles.
Contextualization, Personalization, and Choices
Cordova examined the roles of contextualization, personalization, and provision of choices as enhancers of intrinsic motivation in students. There was a time when it was normal pedagogical practice to introduce new material out of context; and to a certain extent, some teachers still do this, especially in teaching reading through the back door of phonemic awareness (cf. Krashen). According to Cordova, this is one reason children seem to cut their ties with intrinsic motivation once their enter school. Most educators agree that material should always be presented in context and in a way that is suited to each student’s learning style and intelligence and that provides them with choices in regard to how they wish to absorb that material. Recent research supports differentiated instruction, which involves “the realization that all learners vary in their readiness, interests, and learning profiles” (Hess 1).
Again, we can look to Gardiner’s taxonomy of multiple intelligences to discover ways to nourish the natural intrinsic motivation inherent in all students. Cordova writes, “Presenting learning activities … in meaningful contexts of some inherent appeal to children should have significant beneficial effects on children’s intrinsic motivation and learning” (2).
CONCLUSION
With all the problems of our educational system, there is no denying that pedagogical and psychological research has led to productive changes in teaching methodologies and strategies. Curricula have become more diverse and universal, and students from all social and economic strata are welcomed and nurtured in more humanitarian, safer academic environments. Researchers are still investigating models of cognitive learning and how they interplay with intrinsic and extrinsic motivations.
At the same time, schools are microcosms of society; and we live in a society where plagiarism is rampant, cheating to get ahead is acceptable, and how you look or how much money you have can determine whether you’ll live out your dreams in the gallery, the orchestra, or at center stage. All children are born with a natural, thriving motivation to live with every fiber of their being. They don’t need rewards or threats or coaxing to realize their inherent drive to learn. Educators and researchers are compelled to investigate two questions: Why do children tend to lose that internal drive? What can educators do to see that their academic journey is safe, rewarding, challenging, and enlightening? By questioning our traditional approaches to teaching—from gold-starring to grading to adorning the finish line with bright lights and fanfare—we have taken the first steps in answering these essential questions.
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