FELTE-ULIS THIRD-YEAR STUDENTS’ BELIEFS AND PRACTICES OF MOTIVATIONAL STRATEGIES IN THEIR MICRO-TEACHING

Abstract

ABSTRACT

L2 learners’ motivation has been voiced by many scholars to be closely related to teachers’ motivational teaching practices, yet many young teachers hardly ever employ motivational strategies in their classes. The question to answer is whether those teachers are aware of the effect of the techniques to motivate learners and practice those techniques during pre-service teacher training programs. There have been a significant body of research on this matter in the world but since there has been little research on this matter in Vietnam, this study was carried out. The study took third-year students at the Faculty of English language Teacher Education, University of Languages and International Studies as participants and employed mixed methods design to scrutinize the student teachers’ beliefs and practices about motivational strategies in their micro-teaching. Specifically, 109 student teachers were invited to participate in the research surveys using stratified and simple random sampling method. Questionnaires, classroom observations and interviews were used as data collection instruments while descriptive statistics and interpretative procedures served as the main data analysis methods. The findings reveal profound beliefs of the third-year students about the effectiveness of motivational strategies as well as their attempt to apply the strategies in micro-teaching. An undisputable link between the student teachers’ beliefs and practices about MSs was also identified since the participants had the tendency to use the strategies which they highly value. Besides their beliefs, other factors such as students and classroom conditions, particularly micro-teaching context, lesson contents and learners’ level, also relate to the third-year students’ application of MSs in micro-teaching. These results suggest the pre-service teachers should try to vary the use of MSs in their teaching, even the techniques that they do not evaluate, for better motivating effects.