CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 36Teacher Education and Leadership StudiesMotivation and Self-Concept in SportsTeacher Professional Development and Motivation

Understanding and Enhancing Chinese TEFL Teachers’ Motivation for Continuing Professional Development Through the Lens of Self-Determination Theory

Open access
Yang, Jie·2021·Frontiers in Psychology
DOI 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.768320PMC PMC8657765
Open this paper in CoChat — free accountOpen PDF

Abstract

Teachers' continuing professional development (CPD) is a dynamic process that coordinates teachers' external behavior and internal states. Most teachers participate in varied forms of CPD activities either voluntarily or contractually. The more motivated teachers are to engage in CPD, the more likely they achieve professional and personal growth. Against this backdrop, the current study, adopting the framework of self-determination theory (SDT), sought to investigate the types and levels of Chinese college TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language, hereafter TEFL) teachers' motivation toward CPD. The questionnaire survey was administered to 402 academics who taught the English language in diverse universities in China. The quantitative analysis showed that teachers exhibited stronger identified regulation and intrinsic motivation than external regulation. Specifically, the exploratory factor analysis identified five motivational orientations: inner-directed academic improvement and cognitive interest, academic self-fulfillment and obligation, academic and social responsibility, social recognition and promotion, lacking the intention for CPD, which corresponded to the SDT motivation continuum. To triangulate, further interviews were conducted with 12 TEFL teachers. The findings of the qualitative analysis-the thematic analysis through Nvivo (Version 12) on the open-ended question and the interviews, revealed that teachers' struggles in CPD were mainly concerned with the school-related, CPD-related, and teacher-related problems. Moreover, a big gap between teachers' needs and contextual support was found to be bridged. Based on the findings, this study proposed that social conditions should support teachers' basic psychological needs in order to sustain and enhance TEFL teachers' motivation for CPD.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.768320

Cites

88 of 88 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Research works printed but not linked: 2

  1. Liu H. Kou J. (2014). An empirical research on university English teachers’ motivations to participate in the “Visiting Scholar Program”. Foreign Lang. Foreign lang. Teaching 6 13– 19. 10.13458/j.cnki.flatt.004032 · DOI
  2. Xu J. Cai C. (2013). Review of teacher motivation research. Waiyu Jiaoyu Niankan 2013 55– 62.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Yang, J.
Affiliations
Macau University of Science and Technology (MO)
Corresponding author
Yang, Jie
ORCID
Yang, Jie
Venue
Frontiers in Psychology
Publisher
Frontiers Media SA
Published
2021-11-25
Volume
12
Pages
768320-768320
ISSN
1664-1078 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.3389/fpsyg.2021.768320
PMC
PMC8657765
OpenAlex
W3216250038
Cited by
36
References
88
Citations by year
2026: 12 · 2025: 11 · 2024: 7 · 2023: 6
FWCI
5.71
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • Frontiers in Psychology (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Education › Teacher Education and Leadership Studies
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Motivation and Self-Concept in Sports
  • Social Sciences › Education › Teacher Professional Development and Motivation
Keywords
continuing professional development, teacher motivation, self-determination theory, Chinese university teachers, intrinsic motivation, identified regulation, basic psychological needs, motivational orientation, teacher professional development, contextual support

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review