Choosing Teaching Profession as a Career: a case study of Ca' Foscari students

Abstract

For many decades, scientific literature in educational studies has been focused on foreign language learners’ motivation; in contrast, too little attention has been paid to foreign language teachers’ motivation. However, in the last few years, considering the importance of motivation in the field of education, more attention has given to understanding students’ motivation to pursue the teaching career. It has been seen that choosing teaching as a profession includes many different factors and reasons. Their reasons of entering this job can have significant influence on their commitment to the profession. This study, in this sense, is an attempt to investigate what motivates students to enter the teachers’ profession. To do this, an empirical survey, by means of structured interviews was carried out. The participants were 17 students enrolled in the Master's Degree Course in Scienze del Linguaggio at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. The students had in common the aspiration to become future teachers. Results showed that most participants were positively attracted to the teaching profession, and that, their past experiences as students also had had an influence on their future job. At the end, through the guided imagery prompts their ideal language teacher selves were analyzed.