Jennifer Brower
English Argument
December 8, 1995A common opinion about literacy is that students are motivated to become literate as a result of formal education, that schools should be able to instill literacy in students of all levels of learning and cultures. One way school can act as motivation is academically: a student may be motivated by the reward of good grades or other academic recognition such as Honor Roll status. Conversely, not qualifying for Honor Roll or earning poor grades may motivate the student to work harder at becoming literate. Motivation may also derive from a teacher who interests the student in learning new reading materials and discussing them in writing. The opinion that formal education is responsible for students' motivation and level of literacy is expressed by E. D. Hirsch in "Literacy and Cultural Literacy." Hirsch argues that there must be a common foundation of knowledge as a background for effective communication among peoples. His belief is that this "cultural literacy" can only be taught through formal education. This stresses the need for a teacher to produce students that are fully literate in the common foundation of knowledge. The foundation itself may include an enormous range of topics that are all felt to be necessary background information for literate communication. James Paul Gee also feels literacy should come from within formal education. In an article titled "Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction," he argues that if schools would include acquisition in addition to learning, literacy would be a much easier task. Acquisition involves the use of models and trial/error processes in the course of absorbing information. The teacher would need to provide opportunities for acquisition in addition to the typical reading, writing, and book knowledge aspects of literacy as it is taught today. Hirsch and Gee agree that a teacher is an important source of a student's literacy, therefore assuming the teacher plays some part in a student's motvation. The Varied Motivations For Becoming Literate
To change formal education in the ways Hirsch and Gee suggest would place greater responsibility on the shoulders of teachers. Hirsch comments that "the failure of our schools to create a literate society is sometimes excused on the grounds that the schools have been asked to do too much." (25) In my opinion, the motivation to become literate is a combination of forces, not simply a result of formal education. Academic motivation, such as earning good grades, achieving Honor Roll status, and competing among peers, is certainly an important result of formal education. When a teacher does his/her job well, or the student enjoys the teachers and wants to impress him/her, then teacher-motivation is also a favorable result of formal education. However, these motivations are only a small part of a student's overall motivation to become literate; other important influences on the student are often overlooked. A student's cultural background, for example, can motivate him/her to take an interest in literacy to many different degrees. Each culture has a unique level of literacy at which they function, and as students approach literacy, this level is an influence on their degree of motivation. The amount of self-motivation and what stimulates this are factors in a student's choice to pursue literacy. Self-motivations are reasons the student has decided that literacy is important to him/herself; self-motivations may or may not result from other motivations, stimulated in the home or by a teacher. There also may be outside or personal motivations for the student, often some kind of reward unrelated to literacy, such as money or attention. All of these and more factors influence the student every time a teacher makes an effort to help a student become literate. In my argument, I will focus on the non-academic influences on a student's motivation in order to expose the complexity of the motivation to become literate.
The sources of a student's self-motivation are goals or purposes the student has for reading and writing. ( 70) These goals are based on the "beliefs he holds about the importance [of] reading and learning, the attributions he attatches to his success or failure, and the feelings about or interest in what he is reading or learning." ( 70) A student may set one of two kinds of goals for him/herself, a learning or performance goal. Beach explains that the motivation behind a learning goal is to gain knowledge and enjoy literacy through pleasure reading/writing, while a performance goal is formed around the motivation to "gain public recognition or demonstrate superiority" to other students. ( 70) Both of these motivations are affected by the student's interest in what they are learning. If they "value the topic of the text," they are more likely to profit (at the very least through enjoyment) from the learning experience and knowledge and therefore would be motivated to continue learning. Beach remarks that the teacher can influence the type of goal set by a student through the teacher's actions in the course of classroom learning. Furthermore, the division of authority between teacher and students affects how motivated the students are. ( 71) A student's development of learning goals result from components of classroom learning such as monitoring of individual progress of students by the teacher and encouraging of independent thought and goal-setting. Other input a teacher could provide to affect a student's goals is social comparison of progress among students, and in terms of power, a controlling atmosphere. ( 71)
The role culture plays in motivating a student can be demonstrated in a comparison of two examples. In Sylvia Scribner's "Literacy In Three Metaphors," the West African Vai society is discussed. This culture views literacy as a practicality, using it for personal and public records, correspondence, and diaries. Literates in the society, who may be literate in as many as three scripts - the Vai, Arabic, and Roman - are held in extremely high regard. A student who was raised in the Vai culture would have different priorities for becoming literate that related to how much literacy they needed and what they needed to know to survive. Their motivation would be to continue in the way of their culture because that is what they are familiar with. By comparison, literacy means a completely different thing to students from the African-American culture. As John Ogbu explains, literacy is difficult to attain by African-Americans in the school system partially because of a basic enivronmental difference. ( 2) The difference is between who run the schools (whites) and their African-American students; there are "gross and subtle mechanisms" which separate the literacy education white students receive from that which African-Americans receive. Ogbu cites an example demonstrating that the home life of an African-American has a different "participant structure," or "constellation of norms, mutual rights and obligations that shape social relationships, determine participants' perceptions about what is going on and influence learning"; this "discontinuity" of participant structures is a significant cultural influence on African-American students' motivation. Another important influence in the African-American culture is economics. Economic prosperity isn't necessarily a reward of being literate, and this is due to an imbalance in education (as described above). A resulting motivation may be to develop skills outside of literacy to complement formal education. Overall, their motivation to become literate is definitely a result, in part, of their cultural heritage, just as with the Vai.
Outside motivations can be similar to the motivations for completing household chores: money, privileges, or other rewards that may not be related to the task being completed. Society today is fond of offering a material reward for work that otherwise seems unappealing: our own Speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, was recently "Urging Students to Read With a Little Cash" as reported by Katharine Seelye in the New York Times. Gingrich likened the responsibility of becoming literate to the responsibility of a mature adult's professional occupation; he explains to students of Washington Elementary School that their purpose for learning to read was so "someday you can earn a very good living." In the same article, Sarah Freedman, director of the National Center for the Study of Writing and Literacy at the University of California at Berkeley, argues that "there are multiple ways to motivate kids to want to read" and that Gingrich's approach suggests that becoming literate may be "onerous" despite the monetary reward. The reward is motivation to do something the student may not otherwise do. As in many elementary schools, an agreement between my elementary school and Pizza Hut provided an outside motivation to read. If a student read so many books over a certain period of time, they would receive a free pizza at the restaurant. Similar to Gingrich's approach, this allowed a student to become motivated enough to consider literacy and what it meant to them, and from there decide how they would go about earning the reward offered. The students' evaluation of what literacy meant to them would evidence itself in how well the student read the books, how much time they put into understanding the materials discussed, etc. Sadly, outside motivations often bypass the value of making progress in becoming literate by distracting the student with rewards unrelated to literacy. The results of the pizza program were similar for most students: earning free pizza was the main concern, not the value of the reading experiences they may have had.
In reality, the motivation to become literate is less a result of formal education than it is a result of many influences on the student. The common opinion that literacy is a result of formal education and that students of all cultures and levels of learning should become literate through formal education is too simplistic an opinion. This view cannot possibly account for each student's varied motivations for becoming literate; literacy and its motivations are too complex. Motivational influences may include academics and teacher-inspired motivation but also include a student's self-motivation, cultural background, and any outside motivations. Neither a teacher nor a student fully realizes the significant influences many different motivations have on the student's decision to become literate. To realize the part motivation plays in literacy, one must fully acknowledge that although formal education may provide some motivation, perhaps even a vehicle for the student's other motivations, but formal education is not the sole source of any resulting literacy.
Jennifer E. Brower is a freshman at Carnegie Mellon University, in the College of Fine Arts.Click hereto return to the class's home page.