The use of motivational strategies in language instruction: The case of EFL teaching

With motivation being one of the key factors determining success in foreign/second language (L2) learning, strategies in motivating learners should be seen as an important aspect of the study of L2 motivation. However, empirical investigations focusing on motivational strategies are scarce in L2 research, with one exception being Dörnyei and Csizér’s (1998) study carried out in Hungary. The large-scale empirical survey reported in this paper is a modified replication of the Dörnyei and Csizér study: 387 Taiwanese teachers of English were asked to rate a list of comprehensive motivational strategies in terms of (1) how much importance they attached to these and (2) how often they implemented them in their teaching practice. The results indicate that the list of motivational macrostrategies that emerged in this study bears a certain amount of resemblance to the list generated by Dörnyei and Csizér’s survey amongst Hungarian English teachers, which provides reassurance that at least some motivational strategies are transferable across diverse cultural and ethnolinguistic contexts. However, there are also dissimilarities between the Taiwanese and the Hungarian findings, indicating that some strategies are culture-sensitive or even culture-dependent. doi: 10.2167/illt048.