EIL Teachers’ Motivational Strategies and Students’ Preference in the Deep Southern Part of Thailand

Abstract

This study aims to investigate what motivational strategies are used by Thai EIL teachers, students’ preference, and whether there is a difference between teachers’ use of motivational strategies and students’ preference for them. It is important to discover dynamics between these two variables, since motivational strategies used by English teachers are considered driving forces to enhance students’ L2 motivation. Furthermore, it has been proven that more motivated students can produce better achievement in L2 learning through previous research. Altogether 77 EIL teachers in all six governmental secondary schools in the three southern most cities in Thailand, namely Pattani, Yala, and Narathiwas and their 219 M.3 (Grade 9) students were included. Questionnaires for the teachers and students were main instruments designed to elicit how often the teachers use each motivational strategy among a total of 28 motivational strategies and how much each strategy was preferred by these M.3 students. Descriptive statistics was used to report the mean values of the frequency levels of motivational strategy use and those of the agreement levels of students’ preference for motivational strategies. T-test was applied to discover a difference between these two variables. The results indicated that the teachers equally use innovative and traditional strategies while students prefer innovative strategies slightly more than traditional ones. Last, a significant difference was found between the teachers’ use of motivational strategies and the students’ preference. The difference was greater among innovative strategies than among traditional ones meaning some innovative strategies were not used as much as they were preferred by the students, and vice versa.