Teachers’ Motivational Strategies In Efl Classroom: An Observational Study

Abstract

This research aims to investigate motivational strategies used by junior school English Teachers in Yogyakarta. This is an observational study which is qualitative in nature. The primary data were obtained from classroom observation. Two English teachers from different classrooms in junior high schools participated in this study. They were recruited because they have taught the English language. The result of this study shows that both Teacher 1 (T1) and Teacher 2 (T2) used some motivational strategies such as: Attention ( e.g. Teacher used more friendly greetings with friendly intonation, Teacher used ice breaking), Relevance ( e.g. Teacher gave students assignments based on materials given, Teacher created a comfortable learning environment) Confidence ( e.g. Teacher explained the learning expectation, Teacher challenged the students to do the task) and Satisfaction (e.g. Teacher praised the students, for example: by saying good job). Furthermore, the most frequently used strategies from Teacher 1 are motive matching where she often created a comfortable learning environment for students while inquiry arousal becomes the most frequently used strategy by T2. T2 always asks a lot of questions as open-ended questions to attract students to focus and review the last meeting materials. The result of this study suggests further research to conduct another type of qualitative studies involving interviews to get rich data and explore more about the motivational strategies in English class.