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

Bier. The Motivation of Second/Foreign Language Teachers 
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EL.LE, 3, 3, 2014, pp. 505-522
ISSN 2280-6792
teacher motivation was that of Pennington and her students (for a review, 
see Kassagby et al. 2001, p. 214), who dealt with the topic of teacher moti-
vation through the perspective of job satisfaction in ESL. Pennington found 
that language teachers were demotivated primarily because of high stress, 
lack of autonomy, too little resources to rely upon and poor work incentives 
(Pennington 1995). Years later, Doyle and Kim conducted an investigation 
focusing on three major themes: intrinsic motivation; factors leading to 
dissatisfaction; mandated curricula and tests. They found that there were 
a lot of commonalities between the two sets of the sample considered (i.e. 
American teachers, Korean teachers) (Doyle, Kim 1999, in Dörnyei and 
Ushioda 2011). Shoaib inquired into the motivation of language teachers 
in Saudi Arabia, configuring her research as a large-scale interview study. 
Three levels were identified, into which changes should be made to en-
hance motivation: the teacher level; the managerial level; the ministeral/in-
stitutional level (Shoaib 2004, in Dörnyei, Ushioda 2011). Baleghizadeh and 
Gordani (2012) explored the relationship between teacher motivation and 
quality of work life among secondary high school EFL teachers in Tehran. 
Building on Walton’s work on quality fo work life (Walton 1973, in Baleghi-
zadeh, Gordani 2012) – according to which the construct is composed of 
motivation, performance and job satisfaction – the researchers found that 
teacher motivation was significantly correlated with four quality of work 
life variables, namely work conditions, chance of growth and security, 
social integration and use and development of their capacities. The most 
recent studies on EFL teacher motivation are those by Kubanyiova (2009, 
2012) which belong to the field of language teacher cognition research. 
She found that the fact that language teachers behave differently from 
each other is the product of the «unobservable dimension» (Borg 2003) 
of the teachers’ cognitions as regards the language taught, their beliefs 
about how to teach it, the specific context where they work, the students 
with whom they deal with and, more importantly, the teachers themselves. 
Kubanyiova’s research lets emerge the fact that the teachers’ vision of 
themselves in the future acts as a major incentive to grow as motivated 
professionals. 
Among all these contributions discussing the role of teacher motiva-
tion, there are also studies focusing primarily on teacher demotivational 
factors (Kızıltepe 2008; Sugino 2010). In particular, Kızıltepe conducted 
a research among university teachers in a public university in Istanbul, 
Turkey, investigating the sources of motivation and demotivation among 
them. He found that students are both the main source of motivation and 
demotivation for teachers (Kızıltepe 2008). Of a similar opinion is Sugino 
who inquired into the sources of demotivation among language teachers 
in Japanese colleges and found that the highest responsibility for teacher 
demotivation is that of student attitudes (Sugino 2010). Summarizing the 
findings of research in the field of language teacher motivation, Dörnyei 

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