Motivational Factors of Indonesian Pre-service Teachers Influencing Teaching As A Career Choice: A Survey Study

Abstract

This research aims to identify pre-service English teachers’ motivation to choose English teachers as a career in the Department of English Language Education. This study involved 53 students who take teaching streams in the Department of English Language Education in the academic year 2022/2023. The Factor Influencing Teaching Choice (FIT- Choice) questionnaire adapted from Watt and Richardson (2007) was selected as the study's instrument. There are 54 items in the survey. Microsoft Excel and SPSS were used to analyze the data in this study in order to calculate descriptive statistics. The overall results show that the social utility values are perceived as slightly important as demonstrated by participants’ mean score and standard deviation (M= 5.38, SD= 1.43) , and become the most influencing factor in choosing a career to become a teacher followed by perception (M= 4.75, SD= 1.54), motivation for teaching (M= 4.6, SD= 1.57), and personal utility values (M= 4.40, SD= 1.49). The most frequent factor influencing choosing an English teacher as a career is the make social contribution (M= 6.02, SD= 1.26). Meanwhile, the least frequent factor influencing choosing an English teacher as a career is salary (M = 3.15, SD= 1.48). The researcher advises other researchers to conduct additional data collection approaches with wider samples and respondents and enhance with qualitative methods to obtain more in-depth results.