Review of the Literature Ada Bier Abstract In order to offer a picture of the construct of language teacher motivation, this paper is

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EL.LE, 3, 3, 2014, pp. 505-522
506 
Bier. The Motivation of Second/Foreign Language Teachers
ISSN 2280-6792
2008; Guilloteaux, Dörnyei, 2008; Csizér, Kormos 2009; Papi, Abdollahza-
deh 2012; Moskowsky et al. 2013) which highlight the link between teacher 
motivational strategies and student motivated behaviour, thus confirming 
Dörnyei’s argument (Dörnyei 2001) that teachers are responsible for mo-
tivating students. In addition, it seems reasonable to think that language 
teachers can affect their learners’ motivation not only by adopting moti-
vational strategies but also by being motivated themselves. 
2 The ‘social side’ of teaching
In agreement with Atkinson, we believe that language «is always mutu-
ally, simultaneously, and co-constitutively in the head and in the world» 
(Atkinson 2002, p. 538, emphasis added), thus it is both a cognitive and a 
social phenomenon. The most direct implication of this is that «learning 
and teaching go hand-in-hand» (Atkinson 2002, p. 538), since language 
learning does not happen in a ‘social void’ and in the head of the learner 
only, but it is the result of the interrelationship between the learner, the 
teacher and the sociocultural setting in which they are immersed. 
There are two main reasons for which a sociocognitive approach has been 
adopted here with the general aim of investigating the motivation of lan-
guage teachers. First of all, as previously said, we acknowledge that there 
is a need to conceptualize the learner and the teacher as an interactional 
unit in their effort to pursue socio-cognitive tasks, i.e. learning a second/
foreign language, that the learner could not otherwise perform indepen-
dently; therefore, not only the learner but the teacher as well represents a 
central component in the process of second/foreign language learning. It 
is thus fundamental to explore the cognitive concept of language teacher 
motivation in order to better understand the (social) link between the moti-
vation of teachers and the motivation of their learners. Secondly, the socio-
cognitive approach is an attemp to overcome the «bifurcation in the field» 
(Lafford 2007, p. 746), and to conciliate the two conflicting ontologies of 
cognitivism and socioculturalism, the «two parallel SLA worlds» (Zuen-
gler, Miller 2006), the two «polarizing dichotomies» (Ushioda, Dörnyei 
2012, p. 405). Indeed language, its acquisition and its teaching are not only 
cognitive processes (in the head) but also social (in the world). 
With the aim of accomodating different perspectives or different con-
structs within SLA, several scholars have adopted complexity theory. Lars-
en-Freeman and Cameron state that complexity theory is an «umbrella 
term» (Larsen-Freeman, Cameron 2008, p. 200) covering similar theories, 
such as complexity theory, chaos theory, dynamic(al) systems theory and 
complex systems theory. In particular, complexity theory was adopted to 

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