Instructional Practices that Motivate Students to Learn English

Abstract

Motivation to learn English plays a curial role in students' performance, achievement and attendance. This indicates that instructors should be aware of the importance of motivation and strive to motivate their students. To be able to do that, instructors should have a novel knowledge of instructional prac tices that motivate students so that they can adjust their teaching methods and insert motivational tactics and strategies into their teaching procedures. Thus, the aim of this article is to find out the instructional practices that motivate students to learn English most. For that reason, ARCS motivational model (Keller, 2010) was applied throughout ten weeks in main course lessons of preparatory classes at Namık Kemal University during students' regular class hour. By means of this model several motivatio nal tactics and strategies were inserted to the classroom instruction. Researchers prepared detailed lesson plans according to the weekly schedule and needs of the students and the students were asked to write weekly comments about them at the end of each week. Next week's lesson plan was prepared based on researchers' observation of the effectiveness of the lesson plan and students' comments collected previous week. Using a qualitative research design, comments from 30 students were collected in ten weeks and analyzed. As a result, we have reached the conclusion that students' comments can be evaluated under two headings. The first heading includes comments related to classroom instruction and the second one is related to instructor behavior and we tried to explain them in detail in this article.