An Investigation Of Motivational Strategies Used By Pre-service College EFL Teachers In Classrooms

This study is intended to explore the pre-service college English teachers’perceptions and applications of motivational strategies, the relationship between them, and the link between teachers’self-report of frequency of utilization and students’feedbacks on students’motivational strategies.Three questionnaires were specially developed for this study to collect the data respectively from45pre-service college EFL teachers from Shandong University, and94students from three colleges at different levels in Jinan, Shandong Province. They were respectively composed of personal information, the appraisals of30selected motivational strategies and two open-ended questions. They were designed to explore the differences between teachers’perceptions and actual applications of strategies as well as their students’ views. In addition, four of the selected teachers were interviewed. SPSS17.0was used for data analysis to obtain descriptive statistics and the results of paired sample t-test and independent samples t-test.The results reveal that there are seven motivational strategies that are the most important and frequently used ones by teachers in the study:give positive feedback and appraisal, create a pleasant and supportive atmosphere in the classroom, develop a good relationship with students, avoid any comparison of students to one another, prepare for the lessons properly, familiarize students with the cultural background of the target language, and make classroom goal structures more cooperative than competitive. In addition, teachers applied most of motivational strategies to their classroom teaching in accordance with their perceptions. There are, however, some disparities between teachers’appraisals and their practices on some strategies due to the limits of fixed teaching hours and materials.On the basis of the comparisons between teachers’self-report and students’feedbacks on frequency data, it is found that students held the same views with teachers in large part. Meanwhile, differences exist maybe because teachers were constrained to apply the effective strategies in classrooms within a certain range, while students wanted them to do more.The thesis concludes with a summary of some effective strategies to inspire college students in Chinese EFL classrooms and some pedagogical suggestions for teachers and schools, such as improving interactions in classroom, providing immediate actions to students’feedbacks, and upgrading learning facilities. More studies are needed in the future to explore the application of motivational strategies by different groups of teachers in classrooms for the benefits of the students in China.