Dávid Smid

Toward an Understanding of Pre-Service English Teachers’ Motivation: The Case of Hungary


Relationships Between the Identified Dimensions

My last aim in Study 3 was to identify links between the measured constructs. To this end, first, I conducted Pearson correlation analysis. The results are published in Table 23. As to the dimension, career intention, which represents students’ choice motivation, what the results show is that its co-occurrence is significant with all the other dimensions. This means that the given co-variances are likely to manifest themselves in the target population of Hungarian pre-service English teachers (Dörnyei, 2007). Further, the correlation coefficients signify that the relationships are rather meaningful as well (Dörnyei, 2007). Most of the values can be interpreted either as moderate (0.3 < 0.5) or strong (0.5 < 0.8) (Cohen et al., 2018); there were only two representing a relationship with a modest effect size (0.1 < 0.3) (Cohen et al., 2018). With respect to the link between career intention and the other L2-associated variables, the results suggest that the stronger a student’s intention to be an English teacher, the more energy one invests in English use in one’s free time (r = .439), the more positively one perceives one’s L2 skills (r = .375), the more intensely one enjoys being in challenging situations requiring the use of English (r = .501), and the less anxious one feels in the earlier mentioned situations (r = –.194). The existence of these interrelationships could be expected: In Study 1, those students with a vivid future image of themselves as an in-service English teacher exhibited a strong sense of L2 competence as well as a desire to continue developing their L2 skills. Further, the link between career intention and motivated behavior is similar to the result I obtained earlier on a small sample (Smid, 2018). As to the correlation between career intention and the variables pertaining to academic studies, the results provide evidence that the stronger career intention an individual possesses, the more effectively one can manage one’s time for studying (r = .238), the more likely it is that one perceives the instructional environment positively (r = .462), and the less likely it is that one perceives the instructional environment negatively (r = –.310). The existence of these previously unidentified links in the literature implicates that the quality of the initial teacher education context and the use of self-regulatory learning strategies bear relevance to a person’s intention to be an English teacher. This supports my qualitative findings. Finally, it is worth noting that, given that the sample consisted of many students who had a weak or moderate magnitude of career intention, it is likely that their responses affected the results of the correlation analyses, and thus, the co-variances might even be more meaningful in the case of students with stronger career intent.

Toward an Understanding of Pre-Service English Teachers’ Motivation: The Case of Hungary

Tartalomjegyzék


Kiadó: Akadémiai Kiadó

Online megjelenés éve: 2022

ISBN: 978 963 454 818 8

In this monograph, the findings of a mixed-methods, multi-perspective empirical study targeting the motivation of Hungarian pre-service English teachers are presented and discussed. When it comes to the Hungarian context, the importance of the topic is indicated by issues, such as the ongoing workforce shortage in the public education sector and the latest reforming of the initial teacher education system. The present investigation sheds light on the complexity of Hungarian pre-service English teachers’ motivation, which was found to be a bipartite construct interrelated with cognitive, emotional, and social processes. It also offers insights into the motivating capacity of the undivided pre-service English teacher education program as well as the extent to which the initial teacher education system is effective with respect to its student recruitment policy. As such, this monograph might be beneficial to researchers, university instructors, mentor teachers, and educational policymakers alike.

Hivatkozás: https://mersz.hu/smid-toward-an-understanding-of-pre-service-english-teachers-motivation-the-case-of-hungary//

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