Analyzing EFL Teachers’ Initial Job Motivation and Factors Effecting Their Motivation in Fezalar Educational Institutions in Iraq

Teacher motivation is one of the primary variables of students’ high performance. It is experienced that students whose teachers are highly motivated are more engaged in the learning process. Therefore, it’s mostly the teacher who determines the level of success or failure in achieving institution’s goal in the educational process. Thus, teachers are expected to demonstrate a high job motivation performance by administrations. However, some teachers seem naturally enthusiastic about teaching while others need to be stimulated, inspired and challenged. There are several factors that provide teachers with necessary motivation driven by which they can work effectively. These factors can be emotional, financial, physical or academic. This study is an attempt to find out what motivates teachers to enter this profession, since the reasons of entering this job has significant influence on their commitment to the job, investigate factors which are responsible for high or low motivation of language teachers in Fezalar Educational Institutions (FEI), which is a Turkish private institution that operates in Iraq, and ascertain the degree to which intrinsic and extrinsic motivational factors impact teachers in their work situation. Based on the review of the recent researches of motivation, in general, and of language teacher motivation, in particular, and relying on the qualitative and quantitative study of the issue, a detailed analysis of some aspects of foreign language teacher motivation is presented in the article.Keywords: teacher motivation, job satisfaction, foreign language teaching, L2 teacher motivation