Reflection and Motivation in Experiential Learning

Experiential Learning is centrally concerned with the role of experience and reflection in learning which is understood as the process of extracting personal meanings from experience through reflection. However, learning is potentially threatening for the individual as it means entering into an unknown territory entailing the risk of failure. It is therefore important to ask also why learning fails to take place, what kind of factors may impede and block learning. Part of the factorsare inside the learner. They depend on the learner’s personal beliefs, assumptions and expectations. Low expectations, unfavourable comparisons with others and the task, fears, anxieties and negative self-attributions may cause the learner to slip into helplessness, withdraw from learning opportunities and give up the attempt, feeling discouraged.

Learning is also a question of the quality of the learning tasks. For Rogers (1975), there is a continuum from meaningless to significant, meaningful learning tasks. The former end of the continuum refers to learning that has little to or no personal meaning and does not involve the learner’s feelings. The latter end of the continuum, on the other hand, is characterized by personal involvement, use of different sensory channels, a sense of self-initiation and discovery, and a tendency towards self-assessment by the learner. The essence of such learning is personal meaning.

Learning can be impeded and blocked by the peer culture in the social contexts and processes of learning. Learners will find school motivating to the extent that it satisfies their needs. Satisfying work gives them feelings of belonging, sharing, power, importance and freedom regarding what to do, and it is also fun. If they feel no belonging to school and no sense of commitment, caring and concern, they lose their interest in learning. Discipline problems are less likely to occur in classes in which learners’ needs are satisfied and where they have a sense of importance allowing them to feel accepted and significant.

Building a community of learners is promoted by the use of cooperative learning techniques. Cooperatives learning teams provide an effective context for the development of belonging and new understandings. Learner talk can be harnessed to the exploration of dawning understandings and new learning. At its best it can produce something quite different from traditional classroom discourse. In an affirming small group, learners feel free to talk in provisional, exploratory ways. They speak tentatively, trying out their ideas on each other. In order to facilitate the learning process in Experiential Learning, the teacher needs to establish and maintain collaborative, ethical norms in the learning situations which reduce the negative effects on the learning atmosphere:

•　Recognize his or her own attitudes to learning and develop a reflective attitude, model a collaborative learner and open doors for personal growth;

•　Be able to tolerate ambiguity, uncertainty and conflicting feeling, and be ready to accept backsliding and mistakes in learning.

(Kohonen et al., 2001: 32-33, with some change)

Framework of Experiential Language Education in context

Kohonen thinks that the basic tenet is that the goal of autonomous language learning needs to be based on a broad Experiential Learning approach. In terms of the conception of man, the learner is seen as a self-directed, intentional person who can be guided to develop his or her competences in three interrelated areas of knowledge, skills and awareness.

1. Personal awareness: self-concept and personal identity, realistic self-esteem, self-direction and responsible autonomy.

2. Process and situational awareness: management of the learning process towards increasingly self-organized, negotiated language learning and self-assessment, including the necessary strategies and meta-cognitive knowledge and the self-reflective and interpersonal skills.

3. Task awareness: knowledge of language and intercultural communication: the meta-knowledge of language at the various levels of linguistic description, providing an unfolding “map” of the whole language learning enterprise.

Kohonen’s second basic tenet is that these components of learner development need to be accompanied by and consciously linked to the teacher’s professional growth towards a critical and ethically based view of what it means to be a professional language teacher. Further, teacher development needs to be embedded in the context of a purposeful staff development towards a collegial institutional culture, connected with society developments at large.

In addition to the intellectual capacities, school success depends to a large extent on the learner’s emotional intelligence of being self-assured and motivated, being able to wait, following directions and concentrating on the task at hand, turning to teachers and school mates for help, and offering help to others. As noted above, learners need to develop the following kinds of capacities, all related to their emotional intelligence (Goleman, 1995):

Confidence: sense of control and mastery of one’s body, behavior and the world;

Curiosity: desire to find out about things;

Intentionality: capacity to work with persistence and develop a sense of competence;

Self-control: ability to modulate, control one’s actions appropriately and develop a sense of inner control;

Relatedness: ability to engage with others and develop a sense of empathy;

Communication: ability to exchange ideas, feelings and experiences with others and develop trust in others;

Cooperation: ability to balance one’s needs with those of others in group situations.

1. Personal awareness develops in learning processes throughout the life cycle. The development can be facilitated in language education by a conscious design of the learning environment in a manner that fosters the learner’s healthy personal growth. Self-esteem refers to how a person feels and thinks about himself or herself. It is based on the appraisal of his or her past accomplishments, the evaluation of present actions, and on the perceptions of his or her ability to attain the goals set for the future. It basically means a feeling of self-worth. How a person feels about himself or herself affects how he or she lives. A healthy self-esteem means that the person appreciates his or her own worth, qualities and abilities in a realistic, but still basically positive way. Self-esteem affects learning in a variety of ways: how one relates to others, what kinds of risks one takes, how one tolerates uncertainty and anxiety, and to what extent one feels able and willing to assume responsibility for one’s learning.

To develop these abilities, the teacher needs to facilitate learners to increase their self-understanding and awareness of themselves. Students are encouraged to ask themselves the following kind of questions:

•　What does it mean to be an intercultural communicator?

•　How do I understand the concept of language for myself?

•　What does notion of communication mean to me?

•　What kinds of smaller tasks does the big enterprise include?

•　How are they related to each other in a systematic way?

•　What beliefs do I have about myself as a language learner?

•　How do I see my role as a member of the learning community?

Experiential Learning challenges both language teachers and learners to work towards the emancipatory goal of language learning as learner education. In Experiential Learning the teacher is a facilitator of learning, an organizer of learning opportunities, a resource person providing learners with feedback and encouragement, and a creator of the learning atmosphere and the learning space. The relationship between teacher authority and the development of learner independence (and interdependence) is intriguing. It is different for learners who are at different stages of their personal growth. The essential question is how the teacher exercises his or her pedagogical power in the class.

The development of autonomy is thus a matter of personal, social and moral education. Cooperative Learning entails working responsibly together towards both individual goals (individual accountability) and group goals (positive interdependence in the group). This dual goal-orientation provides important pedagogical ways of promoting learner autonomy.

According to Dickinson (1992), there are several ways to promote greater learner independence:

•　Encouraging learners to take independent attitude to their learning, thus legitimizing independence as a learning goal;

•　Providing them with opportunities to exercise greater independence in their learning;

•　Convincing them that they are capable of assuming independence, by providing them successful experiences of doing so;

•　Helping learners develop their learning strategies to be better equipped to exercise their independence;

•　Helping them understand language as a system and develop their learning skills on their own, using reference books;

•　Helping learners understand more about language learning so that they have a greater awareness of what is involved in the process and how they can tackle the obstacles.

2. Process awareness. Raising the awareness of one’s own learning and gaining an understanding of the individual and group processes involved is the second essential element in developing autonomous learning. Emphasis on the learning process class attention to the following kinds of elements (Askew & Carnell, 1998):

•　Explicit teaching of learning how to learn;

•　Facilitating active learner participation and providing feedback;

•　Developing understanding, constructing knowledge, making connections and taking control and action;

•　Reflection on student role as a learner;

•　Reflection on learning contents, processes and outcomes and on the context of learning;

•　Group support for the individual; the group as a catalyst as well as a source for learning through a variety of perspectives;

•　Learning about human relationships by practicing them;

•　Developing a feeling of social identity and belonging in the group, enhancing individual identity;

•　Learning how to resolve conflicts and controversies arising in groups.

3. Task awareness. An important part of foreign (particularly second) language learning will obviously take place in informal contexts, outside the classroom settings. However, language classes still provide a powerful environment for learning. It allows language, communication and learning to be made explicit and discussed and explored together, with the teacher as a professional guide and organizer of the learning opportunities (Breen & Candlin, 1981). The quality of this environment is a question of what learners do and how they are guided to work. As proposed by Candlin (1987), the teacher needs to pay conscious attention to the learning of

content: what kind of tasks the learner works with, and

process: how the learner is guided to work on them.

Instructional decisions can be made so that they promote both the language learning aims and the educational goals for learning in general. This thinking combines, in fact, the twin goals of the learner-centered curriculum by facilitating language learners to develop:

(1) The language skills and attitudes, and

(2) A critical self-consciousness of their own role as active agents in the learning process, with an ability to assess their own progress, materials, activities and the learning arrangements (Nunan, 1988).

The twin goal offers powerful pedagogical ways of developing language education. Developing foreign language and intercultural skills together with the goal of fostering active and independent learning requires attention to the following kind of task properties:

•　How authentic and open-ended are the tasks?

•　To what extent do the contents engage the emotions and imagination of the students?

•　What opportunities are provided to develop the language needed to carry out and reflect on the tasks?

•　To what extent are there problem-solving tasks and activities?

•　What opportunities do learners have to reflect on the evaluation of their progress and processes?

•　Do they have access to a variety of learning resources?

Becoming an autonomous language learner is a question of a conscious and ongoing reflection of the tasks, based on personal experiences of language use. Concrete experiences provide a shared point of reference for the reflection. Negotiating the curriculum contents and processes with the learners, which means bringing together the experiences and the intentions of the participants into a shared learning intent that is carried out and evaluated, facilitates them to grasp the tasks for themselves. It is also necessary for them to see where they stand in relation to the goals and what progress they make in the goal direction. They need to see optional courses of action and make personal choices, taking responsibility for the decisions. Seeing options, making choices, reflecting on the consequences and making new action plans are essential elements for the development of autonomous language learning.

The process includes the following broad elements: (1) joint planning and negotiation; (2) setting the aims (teacher’s and learners’ intentions); (3) collaborative exploration (shared intent under the constraints); (4) achievements (core learning and products); and (5) evaluation (shared reflection). These elements are overlapping in practice and involve cyclical processes, but they can be discussed as stages (Boomer, 1992):

a. Preparatory unit design by the teacher—the teacher makes the distinction between the core elements to be studied by everybody, and the optional elements forlearners’ choices.

b. Negotiating the tasks—the teacher and the learners consider the task and the available resources together, working out what the learners already know and need to know.

c. Teaching and learning—the teacher presents the new knowledge and demonstrates the new skills. She arranges for resources and organizes learning activities, answers questions and provides advice and guidance.

Consolidating and documenting learning—the learners present their products. The teacher acts as a critic, adviser and problem shooter, giving individual feedback to each learner.

Evaluation—joint discussions and possible (formal tests). The teacher facilitates learners to review their own work and set objectives for further action.

Leo Van Lier (1996) discusses the development of language proficiency in terms of three successive, cyclical stages that involve certain conditions and yield certain learning outcomes. The process is fuelled by the dynamism of the principles of awareness, autonomy and authenticity and takes place in social interaction:

(1) Through the exposure-language to language awareness. At this initial stage the quality of the exposure is important for learning. It is determined by the characteristics of the language material and the interaction in the social setting. The learner needs to be receptive to the language data to develop a perception of language properties through attention-focusing.

(2) Through engagement in the learning process to language autonomy, developing a comprehension of the language as a system of communication. For the exposure-language to be comprehended and integrated in the learner’s constructs as a personal intake, the learner needs to make an investment in the process and be engaged actively and meaningfully in it.

(3) Through a personal intake to authenticity, which entails proficient and creative communication? To develop a mastery (uptake) and creativity in the foreign language, the learner needs to be committed to the process, and develop an intrinsic motivation to proceed.

There are thus a number of successive conditions for learning to proceed: learner receptivity, active participation, investment and commitment. It results in learning outcomes as a cyclic development from language perception, cognition, andmastery to creativity. The end-result is language proficiency, which is still likely to be proficiency-in-progress. The process needs to be designed and facilitated in terms of the characteristics of the exposure-language, the properties of learner, and the quality of the setting and social interaction in which the learner encounters the exposure-language and human otherness.

(Kohonen et al., 2001)

The foreign language teaching profession is becoming increasingly aware of the broad educational values in language learning. During the processes of English language teaching, teacher should try every means to foster learner autonomy and encourage learners to proceed from technical and psychological autonomy towards an increasingly critical position, understanding language learning in its broader political context.