- Interest (relevance)
- Choice (autonomy and self-determination)
- Success (self-efficacy or the belief that “I can do it”)
- Collaboration and real-world interactions (social relatedness and active engagement)
- Dedication (identification with being a good student, persistence, and willingness to work hard
to achieve goals) - Goal setting, self-regulation, and guided self-assessment
Simply stated, motivation and engagement are both psychological and behavioral; students may
be motivated (or interested) to read and write, but they also need to sustain their engagement with a
task for sufficient time to achieve learning goals. Incorporating these elements in curriculum materials
and instructional sequences requires systematic planning and professional collaboration. Embracing
these elements also requires that educators view students as active agents in their own learning and
create environments in which students have regular opportunities to experience and exercise their
growing competence and independence.
Contributing to the motivation and engagement of diverse learners, including ELs, is the teachers’
and the broader school community’s open recognition that students’ primary languages, dialects of
English used in the home, and home cultures are valuable resources in their own right and also to
draw on to build proficiency in English and in all school learning (de Jong and Harper 2011; Lindholm-
Leary and Genesee 2010). Teachers are encouraged to do the following:
- Create a welcoming classroom environment that exudes respect for cultural and linguistic
diversity - Get to know students’ cultural and linguistic background knowledge and experiences and how
individual students interact with their home language and cultures - Use the primary language or home dialect of English, as appropriate, to acknowledge them
as valuable assets and to support all learners to fully develop academic English and engage
meaningfully with the core curriculum - Use texts that accurately reflect students’ cultural, linguistic, and social backgrounds so that
students see themselves in the curriculum - Continuously expand understandings of cultures and languages so as not to oversimplify
approaches to culturally responsive pedagogy
All students need to be supported to invest personally in literacy—to see the relevance of
the content for their lives and to sustain the effort and interest needed to learn skills and gain
competence. Students who are active participants in their learning and who come to exert greater
control over their reading and writing processes grow in their perceptions of themselves as
autonomous learners and thinkers (Katz, Graff, and Brynelson 2013; Ryan and Deci 2000; Alexander
and Fox 2011).
Respecting Learners
California’s children and adolescents bring to school an abundance of unique resources, including
their primary languages, cultural and ethnic backgrounds, life experiences, particular learning abilities
and disabilities, socio-economic backgrounds, and dispositions toward learning. In order to create
optimal learning environments for all students, it is critical that teachers recognize the significance
of all these variables, as well as other aspects of individual students’ identities and needs. Teachers
understand their students’ multilayered cultural, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds, as well as their
64 | Chapter 2 Essential Considerations