The best way to measure motivation

1. Cognitive principles.

They relate mental and intellectual functions.

1. Automaticity

Efficient second language learning involves a timely movement of the control of a few language forms into the automatic processing of a unlimited number of language forms.

2. Meaningful learning

Meaningful learning will lead toward better long-term retention than rote learning.

3. Anticipation reward

Human beings are universally driven to act by the anticipation of some sort of rewards — tangible or intangible, short term or long term — as a result of the behaviour.

4. Intrinsic motivation

The most powerful rewards are those that are intrinsically motivated within the learner.

5. Strategic investment

Successful mastery of the second language will be due to a learner’s own personal “investment” of time, effort, and attention to the second Language in the form of an individualized battery of strategies for comprehending and producing the language.

2. Affective principles.

Principles that are characterized by a large portion of emotional involvement. Here we look at feelings about self, about relationships in a community of learners, and about the emotional ties between language and culture.

6. Language ego

As human beings learn to use a second language, they also develop a new mode of thinking, feeling, and acting—a second identity. The new "language ego," intertwined with the second language, can create within the learner a sense of fragility, a defensiveness, and a rising of inhibitions.

7. Self confidence

Learners’ belief that they indeed are fully capable of accomplishing a task is  a factor in their eventual success in attaining the task.

8. Risk taking

Successful language learners, must be willing to become "gamblers" in the game of language, to attempt to produce and to interpret language that is a bit beyond their absolute certainty.

9. Language-culture connection

Whenever you teach a language, you also teach a complex system of cultural customs, values, and ways of thinking, feeling, and acting.

The success with which learners adapt to a new cultural milieu will affect their language acquisition success, and vice versa, in some possibly significant ways.

3. Linguistic principles.

The last category of principles of language learning and teaching centres on language itself and how learners deal with these complex linguistic systems.

10. Native language effect

The native language of learners exerts a strong influence on the acquisition of the target language system. While that native system will exercise both facilitating and interfering effects on the production and comprehension of the new language, the interfering effects are likely to be the most salient.

11. Interlanguage

Second language learners tend to go through a systematic developmental process as they progress to full competence in the target language. Successful interlanguage development is  a result of utilizing feedback from others.

12. Communicative competence

Given that communicative competence is the goal of a language classroom, instruction needs to point toward all its components: organizational, pragmatic, strategic, and psychomotor. Communicative goals are best achieved by giving due attention to language use, to fluency, to authentic language and contexts, and to students' need to apply classroom learning to previously unrehearsed contexts in the real world.