Pre-Service Teacher Education through Linguistics and ELT Courses at National University in Bangladesh: Towards an Understanding of Teachers’ Motivation

This study was conducted to provide an insight into practicing teachers’ motivation towards pre-service teacher education through linguistics and ELT courses at undergraduate English programme of National University affiliated colleges in Bangladesh. This is based on the assumption that teachers' motivation has a crucial function in implementation of the goals and objectives of a specific course. Through a self-explorative semi-structured questionnaire this study conducted a survey on fifty English teachers of six graduate (Honours) and postgraduate colleges purposively selected from a divisional metropolitan city of Bangladesh. Analysis verified three-factor-based motivation– intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation and amotivation questionnaire, covering the basic prerequisites of motivation– autonomy, competence and relatedness founded on the Self-determination Theory, explored that most of the motivational prerequisites were not met for majority of the teachers and therefore, many of them were neither intrinsically nor extrinsically motivated; they were rather unmotivated or amotivated. They were upset and unhappy for lack of training and logistic supports, and dissatisfied with the students’ lack of potential and aptitude for the courses and also some of them found the courses ‘additional burden and hassles’ in their literature core curriculum. Finally, this study suggested some redress measures to eliminate the existing demotivating factors so that the courses could be made more effective by removing the obstacles from their landscape.