How to Dissolve a Classroom in a Bottle of Coca-Cola

It’s 1946, July, and you are a man leaving your place of work. Ninety-degree heat and ninety percent humidity combine to transform your tie and the collar of your shirt into an oppressive, sweaty yoke. As you limp, a wilted flower, across Broadway, you lift your defeated brow and your eyes find relief in a gigantic bikini-clad girl with shining hair and glowing skin (and a lot of it). She beams at an unseen figure whose hand, of masculine dimensions, proffers her a bottle of Coca Cola. In simple typeface, the word “Yes” appears across the ad space.

Let’s say instead that you’re a woman on your way to the grocery store, three children in tow, in Bensonhurst. You glance knowingly at the ad in your hurry but anyway you might just pick up some Coca Cola at the store. Couldn’t you be that fun-loving girl-in-the-sun, an object of desire?

The ad is one of history’s most iconic, for its design illustrates a complete psychology of postwar advertising. It appeals to a range of human needs, from the physiological (refreshment and relaxation on a baking hot day in the city) to more complex desires. Sex is a big part of the picture: after all, to what else might this young beautiful woman respond in the affirmative? (Jones).

We all know that advertisers are well aware of the needs of their potential consumers, and so did the Brooklyn-born psychologist Abraham Maslow, who developed a model he called the Hierarchy of Needs in 1943. Maslow proposed that the acquirement of needs is sequential, and that we seek to fulfill one set of needs before moving onto the next category. Therefore, we would make sure that we have food and shelter, warmth, sex and air before we begin to worry about law and order, and that we don’t begin to want status and prestige until we feel secure in love, affection, and family.  As we see in an application of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to the Coca Cola advert, there is a direct appeal to the human desires for belonging, friendship, acceptance, sexual intimacy, and identity (levels three and four in Maslow’s Hierarchy), or in other words, the ad was directed explicitly at a new kind of American consumer, awakening to the pleasures of excess and a burgeoning sexual liberation.  (Abraham Maslow; Jones)

Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, Maslow’s model has been criticized and disproved and relied upon by motivational speakers, psychologists, educators and business managers, and continues to evolve.

We all want to know why people act the way they do. How does motivation work? Motivation theory led Freud to develop his Instinct Theory, and motivation was later handled by Thorndike, Skinner and Hull’s Drive Theory(Sturgeon, p.10), and examined by Maslow and many, many others. In 2001, Zoltán Dörnyei, a professor of Psycholinguistics at the Univeristy of Nottingham, proposed that motivation works along a continuum marked by five categories. At the polar ends of the continuum are “instrinsic” and “extrinsic” motivation. Extrinsic motivation is “when the goal or satisfaction is independent of the activity, whereas intrinsic motivation finds satisfaction within the activity itself.” Dörnyei‘s Continuum condenses both the Behaviourists and the first two “levels” of Maslow’s Hierarchy into the first category of motivation, labeled “External Regulation.” This category is like Hull’s “avoidance of pain” motivator, (Cherry) where, in the case of the language learner, getting an “F” is a pain best avoided. 

The Continuum picks up again on Maslow’s Hierarchy in other instances. The fourth category  (“Integrated Regulation”), for example, works off of the notion of identity and values. In language learning, this is reminiscent of the roles that identity and ethnic group affiliation play in second language acquisition. (Lightbown, p.89) To apply the Motivation Continuum to this assignment, I began this essay by working from one end of the continuum, from the reward of receiving a good grade and the avoidance of feeling guilty for missing an agreed-upon deadline. Yet once I plunged into the research, I moved toward the center of Dörnyei’s continuum, as I began to perceive usefulness in the act. Finally, I began to enjoy the activity of fulfilling the assignment for the activity’s sake, “and nothing more.” (Sturgeon, p.10) In this way, I wound up being motivated intrinsically, and the assignment suddenly became much more meaningful.

My Spanish-language class in Madrid was composed of fellow EFL teachers at my language school, whose motivation for studying Spanish was variable among the individuals in the group. The classes were free and held during lunch hour. At my suggestion, we decided to prepare for the DELE (Certificate in Proficiency in Spanish as a Foreign Language).

In class, we drilled the competencies that would be evaluated on the exam. The exercises in our textbook were designed to prepare the learner for tests of both comprehension and production. For example, reading comprehension questions were timed, and focused on the main idea of an excerpt, as well as specific details, inference, function, vocabulary, and tone.

The theory seemed sound. To prepare for a test it makes sense to know what the test looks like and what each part of the test entails and to do drills that mimic test content and conditions. If a student is working from the extrinsic end of the Motivation Continuum, however, she or he can quickly become bored, as the textbook contains a total of 10 photos (I still have it) and is a bichromatic (black, white and sienna!). The exercises themselves are boring and repetitive. The tasks offer little “joy in the doing,” and for the student who lacks a serious passion for the study of Spanish, the opportunity for failure increases. In fact, after a few weeks, attendance began to lag as tardiness rose, as well as attempts on the part of the students to steer the teacher off-topic. Interest waned, and the class dissolved at midterm, to my disappointment.

Of course, there are many factors at play in the failure of our course to produce a proud group of accomplished possessors of the DELE (two or three of us did go on to pass the exam): Poor study habits, lack of focus due to grumbling bellies, external stress, self efficacy (a person’s perception of his or her own language learning (Sturgeon, p. 5)), the role of the affective filter, and so on.

I argue, though, that these factors are lesser than our failure as a group to work from a place of intrinsic motivation, and that the book and our poor teacher didn’t help!Were the students somehow motivated to seek satisfaction in each task itself, the opportunity for acquiring and retaining proficiency in Spanish would have soared, I’m sure. The question becomes, short of bribing our students with bottles of Coke and beach babes in bikinis: as teachers and as learners, how can we provide for lessons that drive at intrinsic motivation?

References:

1. Jones, Hannah. "Interesting Design…." Weblog post. Interesting Design. University of Kent, 11 Feb. 2012. Web. 12 July 2013. .

2. "Abraham Maslow." Abraham Maslow. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 July 2013. .

3. Sturgeon, Michaelq. Aptitude, Attitude, and Motivation as Predictors in Foreign Language Learning Michael Sturgeon, PhD - Academia.edu. Diss. Lee University, 2013. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Academia.edu. Web. 12 July 2013. .

4. Cherry, Kendra. "Drive-Reduction Theory." About.com Psychology. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 July 2013. .

5. Lightbown and Spada, How Languages are Learned, fourth edition. Oxford Univerity Press: 2013.

6. Sinclair, Mark. "Back Issues." Creative Review. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 July 2013.