Habits seem to get overlooked in motivation research and I’m not really sure why. Perhaps there’s the residue of the old mindset where teachers teach and the students decide what to do with what they learn. Or perhaps it is just teachers being ‘realistic’ about the limits of their control, those limits being of course lesson time and homework assignments. But it seems to me–and this feeling only grows stronger as I read more about habits and as I observe my 12-year-old daughter’s performance in school and at home trying to complete assignments and learn content–that helping learners identify and replace bad habits, and understanding the mechanism of habits is something we really ought to pay more attention to. The reason this is important goes back to Bem (1972) and the notion of behavioral inference. The idea is that when people are not really sure of what they think about something, they tend to infer their attitudes from their own behavior and other external cues. Basically, it’s a case of you believe yourself to be what you do. So what you do is important not only for the direct effect is has on your learning outcome, but for the indirect effect it can have on your image of self that motivates further action (and  solidifies positive habits, but I’m getting ahead of myself a little). I called this post a primer not only because I wanted to cover some of the basics of habits, but also because habits can themselves be primers. But let’s start with a bit about habits. Habits are the “residue of past goal pursuit” (Wood and Neal, 2007b). They are activated largely by context, including places and people especially, but really any sort of environmental or schematic context and they “can proceed independently from people’s current intentions” (Wood and Neal, 2007a). They have the power to really mess up the best of intentions that learners have. Ouellette and Wood (1998, Study 2) found that habits can trump goals, perceptions of efficacy, self-concepts, and attitude accessibility. There is hope, however, because habits can be changed. One study done by Wood , Tam, and Guerrero Witt (2005) is especially interesting because it was done with university students and looked closely at newspaper reading habits– not directly related to language learning or even learning skills or behaviors but kind of close. In the study, students who changed universities (i.e., contexts) were observed to see what habits  continued. The finding was that students’ everyday habits were maintained across the context transfer only if the performance context at the new university matched that of the old one. This highlights the role of context. Context changes  offer perhaps the best–but not only–opportunity for habit interventions. It seems there are several ways that awareness of habits and context changes can be leveraged to effect habit  change (Wood and Neal, 2007b), either “upstream” before the habit cue activates the unwanted behavior by controlling exposure to such cues (environmental engineering) or “downstream” after the habit cue happens by exerting more conscious control over the unwanted behavior. Psychotherapy techniques for changing habits emphasize not only the difficulty of this, but the staged nature of the process. Prochaska in various publications has developed the Transtheoretical Model for behavioral change. He identifies six stages that people must go through to achieve change, stages which represent not only a period of time but also a set necessary steps needed for movement to the next stage. They are: Precontemplation, Contemplation, Preparation, Action, Maintenance, Termination. Identifying the stage the person is in and matching the intervention to the stage to get the person to move up to the next stage is the trick. Although this is actually a program to help people overcome bad behaviors such as substance abuse, I think it might work for an intervention for changing  habits related to learning or teaching (though it will need some adjustment). Here is a more recent list with descriptions and general instructions for each stage.

For language teachers there is considerable challenge in transferring this knowledge into pedagogy, that’s for sure. But is an important part of developing motivated, autonomous learners.