Teachers’ Selection and Enactment of Context-Appropriate Pedagogies: Re-Conceptualising Motivational Strategies in the English Language Classroom

Abstract

Over the decades, extensive research efforts have been directed towards classifying and evaluating motivational teaching behaviours. Recent calls in motivational research, however, have emphasised the need to investigate teachers’ perspectives on how they develop effective motivational strategies so that implications for motivational teaching are firmly grounded in real-life practices. This paper reports on a qualitative case study which explored how two IELTS teachers in a private language school in China selected and enacted motivational strategies that they perceived as context-appropriate. Background interviews, classroom observations, and post-lesson stimulated recall interviews were used to gain insight into the participants’ motivational practices and rationales. The findings indicate that, despite the close correspondence between the teachers’ enacted practices and theory-based motivational strategies defined by researchers, the teachers exhibited agentic capacities in managing a range internal and external mediators which enabled them to develop strategies that served concurrent pedagogical purposes and responded to the perceived multidimensional particularities and exigencies of their teaching contexts. Thus, The study moves beyond restricted analyses of the motivational implications of teaching techniques; rather, it argues for the need to appreciate the full complexity of teaching practices and re-conceptualise motivational strategies as multi-purpose and the study of them as pedagogically holistic.