“Minority Students’ Experiences are Part of Our Life of Teaching”: Hierarchical Multiple Regressions of Vietnamese Teacher Autonomous Motivation and Teacher Engagement

Abstract

This article seeks to understand teacher autonomous motivation and teacher engagement of Vietnamese in-service teachers of English working with Vietnamese ethnic minority students, by presenting their voices and experiences as a hierarchical multiple regression analysis. Relying on the Self-Determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985), this quantitative study draws insights into Vietnamese K-12 English teachers of ethnic minority groups, when it comes to intrinsic, external, introjected, and identified motivation in support of their continuation of daily teaching activities and their further teaching professions. These aspects are likely to be translated into their sense of engagement in their professional contexts to different extents. Applying purposeful sampling for quantitative data collection, we primarily focus on drawing from the teachers’ self-rated competence to better explore a wide range of Vietnamese education insights regarding Vietnamese minority groups. Our findings, based on the multiple rounds of hierarchical multiple regression, suggest that teacher autonomous motivation and teacher engagement appear to be closely associated. Some relevant associations are found to occur under the influence of the teachers’ demographic backgrounds, including personal, familial, and educational experiences. Pedagogical implications are also presented at the end of our study, making way for future research to continue this important scholarship.