What can teachers do to motivate their students? A classroom research on motivational strategy use in the Japanese EFL context

Abstract

In this article, the authors present an empirical study on motivational strategies in English as a foreign language classes at the lower secondary school level. Teachers’ actual use of 15 motivational strategies was described on the basis of self-reported frequency data over a two-month period. Furthermore, the relationships between the frequency of these 15 motivational strategies and the strength of students’ motivation were investigated. The overall results showed that (1) teachers used these motivational strategies in a variety of ways; (2) there were only a few motivational strategies which showed a significant correlation with students’ motivation. In addition, the authors found that (3) the effectiveness of some motivational strategies varied according to students’ English proficiency level. Implications of these findings are discussed at the end of the article.