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

EL.LE, 3, 3, 2014, pp. 505-522
514 
Bier. The Motivation of Second/Foreign Language Teachers
ISSN 2280-6792
and Ushioda (2011) affirm that there are not less than five demotivating 
factors that undermine motivation: stressful nature of the job, inhibition 
of teacher authonomy (because of set curricula, standardized tests, etc.), 
insufficient self-efficacy as a cause of lack of proper training, limited po-
tential for intellectual growth, unsatisfactory career and poor economic 
conditions. Yet, the two scholars claim that teacher motivation is strongly 
amplified by intrinsic motives (i.e. love for the subject taught) reason for 
which, however, it is difficult to consider teaching a «profession» (Bess 
1997, p. 431) because in today’s society extrinsic results count more. 
These three components of the ‘hidden side’ of teaching, i.e. cognition, 
affect and motivation, interact with each other and with the ‘social side’ 
of teaching, i.e. the surrounding people and context,
5
through the practice 
of reflection. The teacher as «reflective practitioner» (Schön 1983, in Wil-
liams, Burden 1997) makes use of reflection both during the lesson (reflec-
tion in action) and after the lesson (reflection on action) in order to explore 
(and learn from) the interactions between his/her expectations, what s/he 
did during the lesson and the susbequent results, i.e. the learners’ reac-
tions to the lesson, his/her feelings associated to both the lesson and the 
learners, the learners’ successes and/or failures, etc. Reflective practition-
ers are quality teachers: «when teachers are encouraged to reflect criti-
cally on their practice, the quality of their teaching improves dramatically» 
(Gomez, Tabachnik 1992, in Knezevic, Scholl 1996, p. 81) because, through 
critical reflection, they gain higher control over the teaching/learning situ-
ation. Freeman considers the use of reflection so important that, according 
to him, the main aim of teacher education should be that of reflecting upon 
experience in order to understand it (Freeman, 2002). Therefore, reflection 
is not only a means through which a teacher could improve the quality of 
his/her teaching, but also a way to understand experience and learn from it. 
4 Conclusion
As Sealey and Carter summarise, «motivation is […] not conceptualised 
as an individual difference characteristic, but as emergent from relations 
between human intentionality and social structure» (Sealey, Carter 2004, 
in Ushioda 2009, p. 221, emphasis added), thus stressing the interrelation-
ship between an inner, psychological element – i.e. human intentionality 
– and the social, outer environment – i.e. social structure. 
In line with this statement, two major points emerged from the litera-
ture hitherto reviewed. First of all, we have seen that language teaching 
5 
Kwo affirms «conditions for reflective teaching include the entire environment and the 
persons associated with it» (Kwo 1996, p. 314) 

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