Motivating Learners to Learn: Libyan EFL Teachers’ Strategies and a Perspective

The pursuit for motivated students, for the teachers who teach, has been analogous to the pursuit of beauty and truth by human kind —the target is worth pursuing but we have only a slender chance of attaining it in our life time. The present study examined the motivational strategies of English language teaching of 85 teachers from different locations in Libya (64 males and 21 females, teaching in a variety of institutional contexts, ranging from secondary schools to universities. The questionnaire data adapted from Dörnyei (1994) were verified by means of reliability analysis. Items, which reduced the internal consistency of a scale, were omitted from the scales and were treated as single-item variables. The frequency items were compared using standardized scores. The data were analyzed by means of frequency, percentage and arithmetic mean. The main findings show that the promoting goal setting and goal-orientedness were rather neglected area in the participating teachers’ practice. This tells that the teachers’ own behavioural modeling could be exploited more thoroughly in motivating learners. Based on this study’s findings, some applicable and useful motivational strategies are recommended for enhancement and improvement of the students’ motivation