Self-Regulated Learning: C'mon You Can Do It!

Motivation and Self-Regulated Learning play a critical role in one’s learning as a behavior that is instigated and sustained. Hence, a learner’s engagement and persistence in goal directed learning tasks are the factors affecting motivation and self-regulation. Significant attention is needed to be paid to personal goal setting and ways to develop self-perceptions of control in learning and strategies (Driscoll, 2005). To this point, self-regulation is defined as a process where learners activate and sustain cognitions, behaviors and affects that are systematically oriented in setting goals (Zimmerman et. al., 1989). The self-regulation process can be analyzed in three stages; forethought phase that involves the self-regulatory processes that happen before a person acts, performance phase, in which occurs during the behavior and it involves self-control and self-reflection phase that occur after behavior.

Specifically, as an EFL teacher, I strongly believe that effective goals are specific, challenging and attainable in the short term regarding to the forethought phase. If an activity works, repetitions play a crucial role to make the input attainable and sustainable. In addition to this, sustaining curiosity is another factor affecting one’s learning motivation so that the instructors need to use their class time affectively to make necessary connection in activities in a fun and humorous way.  If you are working with young learners, you may need this strategy a lot more than the teachers of adults. Hence, it is challenging to set goals for self-regulation with young learners unless there is a guidance of a mentor or parent. As an EFL teacher of young learners, I try to manage all aspects of motivation in order to control and regulate my students’ learning as well as using specific strategies to support learning in English classes having multiple dynamics. With this, we can combine positive self-efficacy beliefs to make our learners more confident in using metacognitive skills. As Bandura (1997) suggested that there are some principal sources influencing self-efficacy skills of learners. If a learner has an accomplished task or previous success at a task, he or she may persist in achieving other related tasks along with the perception of self-efficacy beliefs as it is called “enactive mastery experiences.

As a second source of information comes from a learner’s observation of a role model as it is called “vicarious experiences” (Bandura, 1997). Referring to the young learners again, I could state that children are more likely prompt to follow the behavior of their peers and observe their modelling. For instance, students who observed their peers in presenting “stories based on fantasy creatures, led the weak ones to think and create some ideas about what to write and motivated them to start on the first draft, so that they could feel free to make mistakes and use their ultimate potential to complete their story as they perform modeled tasks themselves. In addition, the peer models contributed to the self-efficacy of weak/slow students in their final writing: “stories about fantasy creatures”. This positive contribution can also be supported by a peer- check list before the teacher reads their final version of stories or a verbal persuasion as most of the teachers support their students’ learning by a praise even succeeding an easy task. Those verbal utterances can be exemplified as “C’mon, you can do it, you did an excellent job, this is the best story I read, Go on you are on the right track and so forth. However, continuing motivation is crucial in learning and achieving new tasks so the learners can extrinsically motivate themselves by raising their interest on a task being taught. By doing so, learners can get benefit from extrinsic forms of recognition referring to the “notion of social effects” by Bandura’s social learning theory (1997). All in all, motivation and self-regulated learning do work well with challenging tasks as it recalls us “zone of proximal development” by Vygotsky as that realm between one can achieve on his own and that one can achieve given assistance. This assistance is possible with instructional clarity; by explaining things clearly, teaching at an appropriate pace, and step by step as well as giving learner appropriate time to practice and recaps. A better approach would follow varied approaches and theories within a good analysis of learners’ dynamics and learning styles in a moderate way.

References

Driscoll, M. P., (2005). Introduction to theories of learning and motivation (pp.307-348).