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Talking about punishment is a very sensitive subject and very different from culture to culture. The eyes there is looking at the punishment is going to be very different if it a teacher from Denmark or if it a teacher from asia, latin america ect. Yesterday I walk in the street in Thailand I saw a grandma using ruler to hit a little boy because he was not behaving, if that happens in Denmark i would call the police, but I did not do that yesterday. The question is why? The simple answer is because the culture is different. Does that mean that I think it's okay to hit a little boy with a ruler? Definitely not. So how does punishment influence the students learning in the classroom? I guess first we have to look at who is the students. I think that by student is mainly younger learners and teenagers the question refers to. Those students has often not choose to study a second language and therefore the teacher will need to find an outside motivation for those young learners. Punishment with adult must be really rare because opposite the young learners the adults have an inner motivation to learn a second language whether it is for work or holiday use or any third reason. The second thing we have to look at is what is punishment? This question is going to be answered different depending on culture and belief as mentioned in the beginning. For me punishment is all physically violent, but also mental violence where the teacher is degrading the students inner world. Personally I think the answer of the question is really simple, because how is the teacher going to motivate the student to learn anything if the only have fear for the teacher? If the student fear to speak up because the teacher make fun of them if the answer is incorrect? Or if the students are to noisy the teacher punish with violent? Or if the students repeating bad behaviour and the teacher sending them outside the door and excluding the students from the rest of the class? So the answer to the question is punishment in the classroom does affect the students' motivation for learning a second language in a negative way. The teacher has to find the inner motivation, without the inner motivation it is going to be very hard to learn any new skills. Some culture will argument against this because how is the teacher going to maintain peace and order in the classroom without punishment? I don’t think there is any easy answer for that. I guess it depends on the students and classroom environment. The teacher is the main responsible for maintaining peace and order in the classroom and therefore creating space for the inner motivation to grow. Maybe the students need more practical tasks or better explanation of the task? Maybe the teacher needs to make space for more physical expression or creating smaller groups in the big classroom? The teacher has to try different techniques to find what works for exactly this student group.
