Language Teacher Motivation Research: Its Ends, Means and Future Commitments

This chapter reviews research which highlights the role of language teacher motivation in supporting students’ meaningful engagement in language learning in the classroom and beyond. In addition to providing a brief overview of teacher motivation research, my aim is to focus on those strands of inquiry that have made or promise to make significant inroads into relating what moves teachers to do what they do with the educational consequences for their students. I will argue that in order to advance research that is relevant to the lives of language teachers and students, the future language teacher motivation research might find inspiration from transdisciplinary orientations to conceptualising the subject as well as the method of inquiry. I outline some possibilities for advancing future research agendas along these lines.