Investigating Pre-service Teachers’ Teaching Motivation in Korean EFL Context

The purpose of this study is to investigate pre-service teachers’ motivation to choose English language teaching as their career in the Korean EFL (English as a foreign language) context. A total of 102 students took part in this study. The participants of this research responded to a network-based online questionnaire survey with the motivational factors that had influenced them to choose a teaching career for their professional development. For the conceptual framework of this study, the adapted FIT-Choice scale (Factors Influencing Teaching choice scale) was utilized to find out the factors that influenced teaching motivations of prospective teachers to choose teaching as their future career. This study discovered that the Korean EFL pre-service teachers’ highest teaching motivation was the intrinsic motivation. The second significant teaching motivation was altruistic motivation followed by extrinsic motivation. This paper suggested some insights in identifying the key motivational factors of Korean EFL pre-service teachers in order to recruit and train the most qualified teachers for the future. Implications were proposed for educators in pre-service teacher training programs to help them understand the motivational perspectives of prospective teachers.