EFL teachers’ beliefs about students’ motivation towards learning English during emergency remote learning at an Indonesian junior high school

Abstract

With the outbreak of COVID-19, the teaching and learning process is mostly conducted online. However, the implementation of online learning in this pandemic situation is not the same as a well-planned online education system. As a result, the concept of online learning was shifted to emergency remote learning (ERL). This method can bring advantages, but not all students can take advantage of this method. The longer this pandemic situation made the students’ interest and learning motivation decrease. Therefore, the study aimed to investigate the EFL teachers’ beliefs about the seventh-grade students’ motivation to learn English during ERL at SMPN 1 Kawunganten and their strategies to motivate the students in learning English. Based on the teachers’ beliefs, there were both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation influencing students’ learning. In intrinsic motivation, there were several internal factors, namely challenge, students’ enjoyment of learning English, fun learning activities and students’ interests, students’ passion for learning English, students’ knowledge, skills, attitude or behaviour, and curiosity. Meanwhile, in extrinsic motivation, there were several external factors, namely the benefit of learning, academic achievement, English status and the importance of the English language, students’ relationship, students’ family conditions, economic conditions, and the environment. Moreover, the teachers had taken several strategies to increase the students’ motivation during the ERL that were using a fun approach, being a communicative teacher, using innovative and various learning methods, and doing self-introspection in teaching. With a good implementation of these strategies, the teachers believed that they could face the challenges ahead so that they could increase the students’ motivation to learn English.