Motivation for Teaching Students at a University: The Ecologization of Pedagogical Communication as a Methodological Technique

Abstract

One of the ways of increasing the educational motivation of students called by the authors the method of pedagogical discourse «greening», which means the ability of the pedagogue to organize the meaning part of his speech, giving it the ability to awaken the student’s propensity to develop an optimistic attribute style. The verbalization of some pedagogical tactics, considered in the scientific literature as tactics increasing the educational motivation of students – praise, censure, encouragement etc. are assessed from the point of view of compliance with the optimistic standard. The Pedagogical Speech Assessment Method has been applied for the first time in this work and includes the evaluation of the life events attribution of M. Seligman (personalization/control locus, stability/permanence and generalization). Emotional features that make it difficult to communicate between teachers and students - the prevalence of negative emotions, low emotional control – are considered in the context of the theory of learned helplessness and learned optimism by M. Seligman. The demotivational potential of learned helplessness and the motivational potential of optimism are described in the paper.

Key words: motivation, learned helplessness, optimism, pedagogical tactics, pedagogical strategy, locus of control, explanatory style

DOI: 10.7176/JSTR/6-05-05