Directed Motivational Currents and Language Education. Christine Muir

us turn to the story of Rifath Sharook. Rifath was a young Indian boy who, in the words of Forbes India, lived to both ‘breathe and eat space research’.¹ He grew up spending evenings in the garden with his astronomer father, gazing up at the night sky through a telescope. On watching the explosion of the INSAT-4C satellite just 72 seconds after its launch in 2006, he struggled to understand the difficulties surrounding the launch of a satellite into space. His father told him he would see for himself, when he launched his own satellite in the future – Rifath quietly committed to himself that he would. Rifath’s story took a turn when, at the age of 10, his father died and he was left without his teacher. In his own words: ‘All the things I got is a slow 2G internet connection in my village. So I used the internet as my teacher, I started learning about all the space research and technology.’² His passion and intense drive later saw him join a team through Space Kidz India,³ and ultimately – and while he was still in the process of completing his undergraduate degree in physics – design the smallest satellite in the world, which was launched into space by NASA in 2016.⁴

      Through this project, Rifath and his teammates had clearly achieved something extraordinary. Driven by an intensely personal goal – rooted in his relationship and shared passion with his late father – he had worked immensely hard to achieve it. In a TEDx talk discussing their accomplishment, Rifath and one of his teammates, Mohammed Abdul Kashif, emphasised the importance of leadership, team management and positive group dynamics. Yet, as they described, having a common goal and joint vision was core to their success. They had a crystal clear idea of what it was they wanted to achieve, and this served both to block out competing opportunities for action and to continually trigger their attention back towards their goal. Indeed, their toughest hurdle was ultimately overcome via inspiration sparked from eating gulab jamun (a type of sweet and sticky fried dough ball) over dinner: What if they could build a satellite just as small and light?

      Remarkably, the reaction to their achievements was not universally positive. As Rifath went on to describe in this TEDx talk:

      Even a lot of big scientists and a lot of experts also told, why you students are concentrating in this kind of research? You have to study first, you have to settle up in the life, after that you can peacefully do the research. But we don’t want to wait for that time.

      They did not want to wait, and – in today’s world, where they were able to access all the resources and support structures needed in order to achieve their goals – why should they have had to?

      I am unable to comment on the levels of Rifath’s engagement with his physics degree throughout this period, but the question would surely not be unwarranted. With such experiences of success and achievement in his own time – experiences that allowed him to act wholly authentically to his most personal goals and ambitions – to what extent could his formal studies have facilitated the same levels of engagement? In the context of English language teaching (ELT), such a stark authenticity gap has certainly been documented.

      In Sweden, for example, students are not only surrounded by English in their lives outside the classroom, but their using it as a means of communication is becoming increasingly commonplace. As Henry (2013) has explored, this includes through online gaming, a pastime that offers a very real avenue of language learning for many around the world. Compared to the authenticity and autonomy that students can experience in the context of playing video games, the dry reality of classrooms can be unable to compete. As Henry describes, in order to succeed, players are required to work collaboratively, creatively, develop and draw on deep wells of knowledge, and interact not only with each other but ‘with the game itself’ (Henry, 2013: 137). It is therefore unsurprising to read his subsequent observation: ‘the English of today’s classrooms may by comparison seem less meaningful. Less “real”. A credibility problem seems to be emerging. There would appear to be an authenticity gap between the two worlds’ (Henry, 2013: 139).

      The students in our classrooms today live their lives in a world different to that seen even as recently as two decades ago. They have access to extraordinary resources and are increasingly technology savvy (and increasingly technology equipped), entirely at home with ‘the “twitchspeed” pace and multilayered delivery of modern media’ (Barcley, 2010: xi). Striving to establish motivating classroom conditions (cf. Dörnyei & Muir, 2019) and facilitative learning environments may no longer be sufficient to ensure that initial motivational impetus is translated into action and into productive learning behaviours (cf. Mercer, 2019; Mercer & Dörnyei, 2020).

One response to this challenge has been a resurgence in the use of projects as educational tools. The lure of projects is rooted in their potential to be able to facilitate for students the same intense surges of motivation they experience when following their own passion projects outside the classroom. Rifath’s story offers one such example of a motivational project experienced in the extreme. By way of offering another, I draw again on a quote describing the extraordinary outcome of a motivational project that we offered in Dörnyei et al. (2016). In the following, an EFL teacher is describing the outcome of a fundraising project that students had recently completed together in her class, which raised money for the Cancer Council:⁵

      the autonomy the students worked with was beyond anything I had seen before. The most telling thing came right at the end when we were debriefing on the whole experience and sharing thank yous. The feedback from the students, in addition to the usual comments on making new friends, having great memories and feeling more confident in their English abilities, also included things like ‘having a new purpose,’ ‘being useful,’ ‘seeing themselves as capable of new things,’ ‘wanting to do it again,’ ‘wanting to teach others to do the same.’ All of these ideas made me realize that on top of the massive high they were on throughout the event and afterwards (as their success was celebrated quite publicly at the school), that they had learnt much more than language and new skills and knew that they could work with a heightened level of intensity towards their English language goals. (Dörnyei et al., 2016: xiv)

      Whether in contexts outside that of ELT and/or formal educational environments (such as in Rifath’s case and that of Caldwell and Honnold), or in the context of ELT classrooms such as that described by the teacher above, it is exactly these intense, long-term surges of motivation that are at the heart of this book.

      Even though to many, this type of extended, intense motivation is immediately recognisable, it is only in recent years that its theoretical basis has been explored. How is it, exactly, that individuals are able to maintain such extraordinary levels of motivation over such extended periods of time? And, more significantly still, how does it come to pass that – even when such motivational surges often come at considerable personal expense – people report enjoying doing so? Inspired by these questions, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Nottingham and worldwide, we set out to explore the theoretical underpinnings of these intense motivational experiences, in so doing coining the term directed motivational currents (cf. Dörnyei et al., 2016; Dörnyei, Ibrahim et al., 2015; Dörnyei et al., 2014; Henry et al., 2015; Ibrahim, 2016a, 2016b; Muir & Dörnyei, 2013).

      A directed motivational current, or a DMC, is a surge of motivational energy that seemingly picks an individual up and carries them sometimes unimaginable distances. Oftentimes, people who have experienced DMCs look back and question how it is they achieved so much (often much more than they could have thought possible: think back to Caldwell and Honnold’s previously unthinkable climbing feats, Rifath and the launch of his team’s satellite into space, or the group of English language students’ extraordinary successes from their fundraising endeavours). During a DMC, an individual’s time often becomes highly structured, with clear routes mapped out to success and daily routines in place to help them achieve it. Significantly, throughout this time, these routines are followed without conscious