At end of last year and the beginning of this one, I have been to Ireland to talk about Just Right, our course for adults and young adults. It is becoming increasingly popular there, and has been adopted at the Galway Cultural Institute and The Dublin School of English, amongst other institutions.
     In sessions in Galway, Cork and Dublin a topic of conversation has been that of ‘visa’ students, so called because their main reason for studying English (according to my informants) is to get a visa to allow them to be in the country. Apparently they present an especially difficult motivation problem for the teachers to deal with.
     Ah, motivation! It’s not difficult to motivate people in the short-term, but sustaining motivation, well that’s a different issue. That’s the essence of the filmed motivation lecture on this site. There are all sorts of approaches that teachers take to motivate even reluctant students, but for me – and this was the main topic of one of the sessions in Ireland – giving students some ‘agency’ is the big key. Agency means trying to get students to take some responsibility or ownership of what they do so that they, the students, are in the driving seat, active instead of passive. I suppose this is what learner autonomy is all about. But of course not all students are keen on taking agency or being autonomous, especially, perhaps, the ‘visa’ students I was told about (or for that matter any student who’s not over-keen on learning). That’s when ‘mandatory participation’ comes in – in other words activities which each individual student has to be involved in whether they like it or not. Examples are things like story circles, information gap activities etc.
    All of that (motivation and agency) has formed a major part of my discussions in Ireland - a country it is  delight to begin to know better.