Abstract:

Institutes of higher education face an assortment of challenges in trying to realize their pedagogical goals of graduating students who are academically prepared to actively engage and succeed in life beyond the undergraduate experience. Our institution, a small private liberal arts college, faces the issues of student retention, cultivating intrinsic motivation, and fostering a sense of belonging both in the classroom and throughout the college community as a whole. Our college community understands that these three issues are intricately connected, leading us to meet these challenges head on with a multi-faceted approach. We have observed that our most successful students are proficient in setting and working towards their own goals, and ultimately learn more about who they are through this experience. Their learning is focused on whole-person development, including but not limited to purely academic pursuits. As such, in our language classroom, we incorporate a variety of activities and opportunities to encourage and foster this development. Our pedagogical practices feature study skills workshops built into the class to focus on the importance of time management across all aspects of the college experience. After the first exam of the semester, students complete exam reflections in which they compare their preparation with their results, assess their efforts, and are tasked with making pertinent changes for the subsequent exams. Another aspect of our language classroom pedagogy features collaborative speaking and writing activities that are customizable to students’ unique interests. Tasking students to collaborate focuses on the communicative nature of language, as well as pair and group work skills that are so essential to the work environment post-graduation. The customizable nature of the tasks allows students to use the target language in a way that is meaningful for them. When students are given flexibility within established guidelines, they are more motivated, more engaged, and therefore produce more comprehensible output than when they are required to fit their knowledge into a standard one-size-fits-all format. These activities encourage students to become active participants in the learning process, helping them shed their fixed mindset of their language ability and move towards a growth mindset. Students come to understand progress in terms of communicative success rather than reducing their ability to a percentage score on a test. The focus becomes language acquisition as a communicative tool rather than memorization and regurgitation as a means of demonstrating mastery. The study skills workshops and exam reflections are geared towards helping students to make these connections, such that their growth mindset extends beyond the walls of our language classrooms and carries over into their other courses. By working with students to change how they understand learning, they come to understand their academic college experience in a different light. They work towards finding their intrinsic motivation, rather than seeking out the rewards from letter grades. When students are motivated to learn, they are invested in their academic experience. When they are invested in their academic experience and feel good about their progress, they are more invested in their college experience as a whole.

Keywords:

Comprehensible Input, Second Language Acquisition, Whole Person Development, Growth Mindset, Intrinsic Motivation.