Motivation and Ways to Motivate Students(7)

5. Cooperative activities
Cooperative activities are at optimal level to keep students feel safe and can stimulate their arousal. Thus, more and more teachers use cooperative activities in English teaching rather than competition, which is also relatively effective. In cooperative activities, students can decrease fear of failure while communicate and exchange information effectively and involve with high emotion and efforts to solve problems. In this case, students who are reluctant and fearful to perform are drawn to participate to share their ideas. This method is suitable for higher level of students to communicate in English. For example, group discussing and doing project, which are complex and challenging, are a good way to enable students to work cooperatively with peers. And as teachers, it is more effective to provide helps and comment fairly on their work in time or ask students to make a self-evaluation about their projects. This enables students to focus on their learning process and allows them to see their progress. And self-evaluation gives students a sense of accomplishment and responsibility for learning.
6. Providing opportunities for students to experience success
The most important use of learning English is to communicate with people by using the target language, but not all of the learners are active to use English especially when they frustrated by failure in English learning. The more ways we can give our students to use English, have fun with English and experience success in English learning, the more likely we are to keep all our students motivated and successful based on the theory of needs and beliefs. And Hamachek has done a good deal of research on the effects of failure on school achievement, and almost without exception concluded that success tends to encourage students to raise their level of aspiration, whereas failure generally causes them to lower it (1972). This point can be reached by providing more chances to join activities for students to experience success with more freedom and self-determination. For instance, teachers can take five minutes out of every class time for students to do the “I am a teacher today” activity in which provides students an opportunity to change their role into teacher to teach other students English on class as a sense of success. During these five minutes, students can decide what to teach such as to review, to teach new words and to tell story.
Conclusion
In conclusion, motivation is fatal important and the ways to motivate students in English learning is more important to English learning. The ways the author mentioned above are relatively effective to motivate and sustain students in English learning. Sometimes, teacher is rather like a salesman who must convince and persuade his consumers (i.e. students) to believe that he has what they need and what is useful for them (cited in Kripa, 1988). As a teacher, it is essential and useful to acquire more knowledge of educational psychology especially motivational rationale and effective methodologies and meanwhile come up with the new techniques to be a good “salesman” to motivate and sustain students in English learning.