Motivation of students and their English teacher in inter-relation: understanding motivational balancing in the light of complexity theory
motivational dynamics, co-adaptation, English language classes, English teaching, English learning
This investigation intends to understand the interrelation between the students' motivation and the motivation of their English language teacher in a class of a private English language course in the city of Belo Horizonte. The theoretical framework of the investigation is in the co-adaptation construct, according to Larsen-Freeman and Cameron (2008), in the perspective of complex dynamical systems. The complex system investigated will be a set of classes and the observation time will correspond to what is necessary to carry out a didactic unit. The teacher's motivation will be registered before, during, and after each class as follows: before, through a short recorded narrative in which she will briefly describe her planning for the specific class; during classes, whenever an activity is carried out by the group, by filling out a form made available from Google Forms, entitled Motivational Meter. Completing this form involves indicating the participant's motivational level (by choosing between: motivated, neutral or unmotivated) and then entering a keyword or short phrase that justifies it. Finally, at the end of each class, the teacher should make a second narrative reporting how the class went, giving her impressions and recording anything unexpected that may have happened, especially related to the behavior of the students. In turn, students' motivation will also be detected at the beginning, during (shortly after carrying out an activity) and at the end of each class, by filling in the same form filled out by the teacher – the Motivational Meter. With the generation of these set of data, we hope to be able to catch co-adaptation events by comparing the data provided by the teacher and that provided by the students about the same experiences in the classroom. We intend to describe such events and hope to be able to understand how the teacher's motivation influences the students' motivation and vice versa, in these investigated classes.