THE POWER OF THE FL TEACHER’S MOTIVATIONAL STRATEGIES

In the first part of this paper, we review the concept of motivation under the perspectives developed by the major theories on this topic. We analyse the role that motivation plays in some second language acquisition theories and focus our attention on the multidimensional nature of this construct by reflecting on its main constituents. A special importance is given to extrinsic motives as a the first step to incentivate amotivated students and some key principles are given to turn them into intrinsic motivation. As a conclusion, we present a dynamic, cyclical and process-oriented model of motivation which takes into account three motivational phases (preactional, actional and postactional) and the main components of each phase. In the second part, we present a research study which aims to find out how powerful eighteen motivational classroom strategies are, according to the perception of a sample of 319 students from Primary, Secondary and Upper-Secondary education and 18 teachers of the same educational levels. Beside