Teacher motivation

Taking the significance of teacher motivation in professional practice and pedagogical achievements of teachers, students and their educational goals, this study aimed to investigate EFL teachers’ motivation affected by the introduction of the Fundamental Reform Document of Education in Iran. For the quantitative phase of the study, a researcher-made questionnaire developed based on the four aspects of motivation by Dornyei and Ushioda (2011) was distributed among 98 Iranian EFL teachers. Afterwards, to capture the salient factors of teachers’ motivation, a set of semi-structured interviews with 7 volunteer teachers were conducted. The results revealed that this reform has had a positive effect on teachers’ motivation yet it has not been that much comprehensive to take into account all the motivation factors except for the contextual ones.

The current study investigated the relationship between teachers’ creativity, motivation and job satisfaction. In so doing, the role of demographic factors, i.e. gender, teaching experience and teaching context was also taken into account. To conduct the study, a total of 103 EFL teachers at both institute and school contexts were selected. The teachers were recruited on a voluntary basis, and the sample included teachers from a variety of backgrounds and experiences, coming from both genders and either of the teaching contexts. Three questionnaires (Teacher Creativity Questionnaire, Teacher Motivation Questionnaire, and Job Satisfaction Scale) were employed to gather the data, which were then analyzed through a number of analyses, including Spearman’s Rank Order Correlation, Multiple Regression Analysis, Mann Whitney U test and Kruskal-Wallis test. Findings revealed the existence of a significant correlation between teachers’ motivation and their job satisfaction. Furthermore, teachers’ motivation in comparison with their creativity had a greater predictive power with regard to job satisfaction. However, demographic factors did not have a significant role in job satisfaction. The findings can offer insightful implications for educational authorities, teachers, school leaderships and academicians to help promote job satisfaction in different instructional contexts.

This study aimed to investigate sources of motivation of English language teachers in Iranian public and private language schools. To this end, a Language Teacher Motivation Source (LTMS) questionnaire was developed on the basis of the related literature. The LTMS examined four sources of motivation, i. e., extrinsic (economic, social, emotional, educational), intrinsic, altruistic, and subject matter motivation. Having been piloted and validated, the LTMS was administered to 200 male and female EFL teachers who had been classified in terms of their gender, age, marital status, academic degrees, job status, and their years of language teaching experiences. The results of parametric statistical analyses showed a hierarchy of language teacher sources of motivation that were not similar among different groups of language teachers in terms of their teaching experiences and level of education. This study suggests that authorities pay close attention to the sources of language teacher motivation to improve the quality of English language teaching and learning.