Sep 4, 2026 · 42 min · 17 segments
A very special podcast collaboration with Will Marks of The Language Lab Podcast where we discuss motivation, storytelling and assessment in the acquisition-driven…
Liam PrinterHost
Will MarksGuest
Since I've been listening to your podcast, I've kind of started not moving over 100% because it's something I'm kind of still playing with and I'm trying to look at how I would do that in my classroom and I want to get it right.
But bringing the kids more into where the lesson's going and allowing them to have a little bit more of a directive force.
And it's amazing because for me, I'm sure this is the same thing for you, but it's had a real effect on behavior management as well.
Because I've got some quite difficult classes and you giving them just a little bit of a, all right, so where does this go next? Just brings them in.
And actually, when we really look at the strategies and the activities and the techniques that we use in a language class or in any class, Much of it is void of autonomy.
Much of it is just we expect the students to just show up super motivated and we wonder why they act out when we're doing something with them that's not inherently interesting.
ultra motivated to a language lesson a lot of them will be doing it because their mum and dad told them to or they feel like they have to if they do even like the language they just want to probably be able to communicate and speak so us kind of thinking and getting upset when they're not super motivated is fine and if that's the way you want to go through your career okay that's totally fine or you could try and change some aspects of your lesson increase the autonomy just a little bit And you will start to see those results when we share a little bit of that power dynamic with them, when we co-create things, when we invite their curiosity, when we build a narrative together in the target language, suddenly they really want to pay attention.
He's one of the first people who ever trained me in this way of teaching with lots of input and lots of story.
And he has this great line, which is like, the less you force them to speak, the more they want to speak.
And like, I really like that because when you give them interesting stories and inputs and make it kind of about them, they want to engage rather than you going, OK, read line two, read line six, do this for me now.
And like I said, I've been testing it out and it's amazing how day on day as well, if they've had a little bit of that in the first lesson, that intrinsic motivation comes back every single lesson and it's an activity where they just got to change a few details to make it about them but the next lesson they wanted to do more of that and they wanted to do more of that and it just brings it back weird question about your thesis was there anything in your research about motivation and about the storytelling that just genuinely made you go what like surprised you I guess
Yeah, I think there was like, there's a couple of things I could say about that.
The first one is that I was surprised or like pleasantly surprised or interested to see how interconnected the three needs for motivation are, that when you raise one, the other two kind of start to come up quite quickly on their own.
Since I've been listening to your podcast, I've kind of started not moving over 100% because it's something I'm kind of still playing with and I'm trying to look at how I would do that in my classroom and I want to get it right.
But bringing the kids more into where the lesson's going and allowing them to have a little bit more of a directive force.
And it's amazing because for me, I'm sure this is the same thing for you, but it's had a real effect on behavior management as well.
Because I've got some quite difficult classes and you giving them just a little bit of a, all right, so where does this go next? Just brings them in.
And actually, when we really look at the strategies and the activities and the techniques that we use in a language class or in any class, Much of it is void of autonomy.
Much of it is just we expect the students to just show up super motivated and we wonder why they act out when we're doing something with them that's not inherently interesting.
ultra motivated to a language lesson a lot of them will be doing it because their mum and dad told them to or they feel like they have to if they do even like the language they just want to probably be able to communicate and speak so us kind of thinking and getting upset when they're not super motivated is fine and if that's the way you want to go through your career okay that's totally fine or you could try and change some aspects of your lesson increase the autonomy just a little bit And you will start to see those results when we share a little bit of that power dynamic with them, when we co-create things, when we invite their curiosity, when we build a narrative together in the target language, suddenly they really want to pay attention.
He's one of the first people who ever trained me in this way of teaching with lots of input and lots of story.
And he has this great line, which is like, the less you force them to speak, the more they want to speak.
And like, I really like that because when you give them interesting stories and inputs and make it kind of about them, they want to engage rather than you going, OK, read line two, read line six, do this for me now.
And like I said, I've been testing it out and it's amazing how day on day as well, if they've had a little bit of that in the first lesson, that intrinsic motivation comes back every single lesson and it's an activity where they just got to change a few details to make it about them but the next lesson they wanted to do more of that and they wanted to do more of that and it just brings it back weird question about your thesis was there anything in your research about motivation and about the storytelling that just genuinely made you go what like surprised you I guess
Yeah, I think there was like, there's a couple of things I could say about that.
The first one is that I was surprised or like pleasantly surprised or interested to see how interconnected the three needs for motivation are, that when you raise one, the other two kind of start to come up quite quickly on their own.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
