How to praise to boost motivation

Children will speak a language, any language, only if they have a reason to, in other words if they are motivated, and one of the trickiest parts of raising a bilingual child is to understand what motivation is and how to trigger it. Praise and reward certainly stand out among the tools most used to motivate children at present, just as punishment was until some time ago. However praise and rewards are not always effective, and can even become counterproductive, particularly in the long run. This doesn’t mean that praise is wrong, but  certainly it needs to be handled with care.

The good news is that if used properly praise actually becomes quite powerful, only, what does “use properly mean”? There are a couple of theories on this, and they all make perfect sense, in fact they are very closely related, so keep reading and try to find what will work best for you and your family. These different theories, or methods, all have the same objective: find a way to praise that will enhance the positive effect, Encouragement, and limit the side effects, Judgment. In fact when we praise someone, as well as when we criticise them, we are judging them and claiming the right to decide what is right or wrong about them. And this can be very disturbing, the idea that anyone, even Mom, can say whether I am right or wrong is not necessarily a pleasant feeling.

So here are few alternative ways to praise without judging, they have been described to promote a balanced education of children, but apply just as well to the education of bilingual children. •

• Active Listening This is one of the most powerful tools described by Gordon in his book PET and is widely utilized in any environment, from family therapy to business training. Active listening basically means to step in another person’s shoes, make a real and sincere effort to understand what they feel (anger, frustration, fear, etc) and say it. The last passage is the key one, it’s not enough to think what the other person feels, you have to spell it out loud (you might be wrong, in that case you’ll just give it another try). BILINGUAL CHILDREN: say the child doesn’t want to speak German, or insists that Mom should speak German to him, then mom could just say: “you don’t like me to speak German to you because you don’t understand everything I say”. This technique is explained very well in this article, based on a really book I strongly recommend: How to talk so kids will listen and listen so kids will talk by Faber e Mazlish
• Praise effort, not results : if a child doesn’t believe in his ability to learn and overcome difficulties he won’t have enough confidence to try and put some effort into it. Funny enough this happens quite often to high performing children, who grow up hearing that they are good and have a natural gift may be, but think they know and they don’t know that they can learn. See this article. BILINGUAL CHILDREN: don’t praise them for what they say and how they say, but for their improvements and for how they are learning
• Descriptive Praise this comes from the Montessori school and the teaching is that instead of evaluating what children do we should just describe it. This has two implications: the child can accept praise without embarrassment, because it is not a judgement but the statement of a fact (you did this and that), secondly this way the child will learn to observe what he has done and elaborate his own judgement. see this article on Descriptive Praise. BILINGUAL CHILDREN: Mummy spoke to you in French and you answered in French. You sang the whole song on your own. This sentence you just said was correct, remember last week you got it wrong? 
• Reflective Listening is very similar to Active Listening, in fact the only reason I list it here is because I find this article very well written, and if you still have the energy definitely worth a look.

As you can see these techniques are very similar, they all point at avoiding judgment and helping the child understand and evaluate what he has done , boosting in self confidence and ability to decide. Punishment and criticism are different issues, we’ll come back to that.

BILINGUALISM STEP BY STEP

Your homework today, I’m sure you guessed already, is to think about these alternative approaches and analyze your own behaviour at the light of these info. Is there something you’d like to change in the way you praise your children? What? Make few specific examples of situation you would now address differently. As usual don’t make vague statements about how you will change everything, clearly identify few specific situations and decide what you will say when they arise.

Picture by A Journey Round My Skull

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