Understanding Pre-service EFL Teacher Motivation for Choosing Teaching as a Career

Abstract

A crucial factor that could potentially support the provision of high-quality educators is their motivation. Improving our education system requires concentrating on the reasons why students pursuing teacher education decide to become teachers (Suryani, 2021). Motivated teachers can potentially help motivate their students to learn. As stated by Alvariñas et al. (2022), motivation plays a crucial role in determining how committed an individual is to taking action and motivation serves to energize people’s behaviors and direct them toward specific goals. Additionally, it gives details on their duties and responsibilities as educators and the extent to which they are engaged with their classes. This study intended to explore more about pre-service EFL teachers’ motivation to become a teacher. A qualitative descriptive design guided this study. It was conducted at a university in East Java, Indonesia. I chose to conduct my study specifically at the English Language Education study program of this university. The participants of this study were two final year students of the English Education Study Program from this university. The participants voluntarily joined this study. I collected data through a semi-structured interview. I asked several questions related to the research question about the sources of motivation to choose teaching as a career. Moreover, this study used qualitative content analysis to analyze the collected data. The findings of this study show that there were four categories of sources of motivation for choosing teaching as a career found in this study, such as intrinsic value, self-perceptions, socialization influences, personal utility value, and social utility value. The most commonly mentioned motivation belongs to social utility value, such as making social contributions, like to work with children or adolescent. and shape future generations. These motivations of pre-service EFL teachers were in accordance with some of the previous similar studies conducted about pre-service teacher motivation. This study is expected to give new insights and information for pre-service EFL teachers that motivation plays crucial parts in teaching in order to generate good motivation to teach and provide optimal education for students. Thus, it's also envisioned that this study will help future researchers who wish to look into this current topic in more detail, such as to find more complex sources of motivation and have more participants to obtain broader data.