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
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Bier. The Motivation of Second/Foreign Language Teachers
ISSN 2280-6792
what teachers believe and think. Burns defines it in terms of «theories 
for practice» (Burns 1996, emphasis added), specifically those cognitive 
structures that teachers adopt for planning, decision making, and behav-
ing in the language classroom. According to Kennedy, this type of teacher 
knowledge has been indelibly imprinted by the teachers’ «own experiences 
as students» (Kennedy 1990, in Bailey et al. 1996, p. 11), by their «ap-
prenticeship of observation» (Lortie 1975, in Bailey et al. 1996). Goodlad 
concludes that the result of the teachers’ experiences as students first and 
teacher trainees afterwards is that they generally «teach as [they] have 
been taught» (Goodlad 1983, in Knezevic, Scholl 1996, p. 81). The conse-
quence is that the role of teacher ‘models’ is crucial because during their 
«apprenticeship of observation» trainee teachers internalize examples of 
good and bad behaviour (Bailey et al. 1996) to adopt and avoid, respec-
tively, in their future career as teachers. Thus, the teachers’ experience, 
positive or negative, of their own language learning at school first and 
university later influences their cognition (Barnard, Burns 2012). 
’Explicit’ and ‘implicit’ knowledge interact with each other and as «teach-
ers select and modify theoretical ideas in ways that are consistent with 
their personal beliefs about teaching and learning and their practical 
knowledge of the ESL context» (Binnie Smith 1996, p. 214), this interac-
tion impacts on classroom practice (Gutierrez Almarza 1996). It is through 
the interplay between their «theories for practice» and «theories of prac-
tice» (Burns 1996) that teachers come to understand their conceptions of 
themselves as teachers, their vision, and their limits (Johnson 1996). 
3.2 Teacher Affect
The most relevant theoretical contributions on the role of emotions in SLA 
were those by Magda B. Arnold, Jane Arnold and Schumann, who adopted 
M.B. Arnold’s theory in language teaching. Both M.B. Arnold’s Cognitive 
Theory of Emotions (M.B. Arnold 1960, and J. Arnold 1999, in Balboni 
2013), and Schumann’s Input Appraisal Theory (Schumann 1998, 2004, in 
Daloiso 2009, and in Balboni 2013) agree on the fact that each emotional 
stimulus from the outside is evaluated by the human brain following a 
series of criteria, in order to facilitate (or hinder) the repetition of the ex-
perience. These theories were primarily referred to language learners but 
they make sense for teachers as well in that for both, teacher and students, 
emotions play a crucial role, being parent elements of conscious feelings 
and motivational drives. 
Several studies in the recent past explored emotions in teaching practice 
in many different contexts. Cowie analyzed the emotional dimension of 
teaching among university EFL professors in Japan (Cowie 2011). Martin 

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