I was asked recently by a teacher of English at a local high school, "How can I make my students like English?" There are two ways to approach motivation. One is a teacher-directed approach involving various activities, aimed at grabbing student interest. The results of this approach are short-term, and usually intrigue students for a class period or less. The second approach is to build a motivational framework into a curriculum that will gradually, over a period of months or years, support learners to motivate themselves. The later is longer lasting and preferable to the former, while it does not exclude the possibility of including fun and exciting activities in a class. Intrinsic motivation and an environment that allows learners to define themselves in their own terms is preferable to traditional styles of topdown imposition of policies and outcomes. Teachers claim that their students with intrinsic motivations learn better than other students, while at the same time those same teachers direct learning along conventional avenues of unexamined goals and outcomes. Teachers feel helpless because their charges do not perform. Students are uninterested in a discipline that is said to be so important to them, but is so unatuned to their needs. In this paper I will briefly define intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. I will describe what some teachers and students say motivates them as language learners, and will characterize the kind of environment that helps students be more motivated.

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[in Japanese]

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