| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立屏東科技大學 === 應用外語系所 === 104 === The present study aims to explore the career motivation among English pre-service teachers at both general universities and universities of science and technology in Taiwan, R.O.C. The education system of Taiwan has transformed from centralization to decentralization through the decades. According to Chang (1999), the growing number of qualified teachers and the decreasing birthrate each year have given rise to a serious imbalance in the demand and supply of teachers in the teaching labor market in Taiwan. In spite of the shortage of the teaching job opening, the number of people applying for the teacher training program does not decrease as might be predicted.
According to Liberty Times Net (Lin, 2014), among all the languages and English-related departments in Taiwan, 8 out of them had abolished their departments or stopped accepting new enrollments; and 9 out of them had changed their affiliations’ names to seek for new beginnings.
In order to investigate the phenomenon, this study tries to examine issues regarding the factors that influence English pre-service teachers’ career choices. The participants were 100 English pre-service teachers from four general universities and universities of science and technology in Taiwan.
For data analysis and discussions, the study adopts an adapted version of the Factors Influencing Teaching Choice Scale (FIT-Choice Scale). Among the questionnaire respondents, three English pre-service teachers were invited to join an in-depth interview respectively. These invited interviewees all took the teacher education courses. They were chosen not only because of their personal traits of being more informative and willing to share, but also for their uniqueness and differences from other respondents. The research adopted both quantitative and qualitative design in order to obtain rich data. It is hoped that the gathered data and discussions could provide useful references for teacher educators and those who are interested in becoming English teachers in the future.
The findings exhibited that intrinsic career value and social utility value of teaching were essential career motivation of the participants, followed by extrinsic career value. Both the male and female participants were more intrinsically and socially motivated. There were no significant statistical differences with regard to participants’ ages and their level of education in the motivation of choosing teaching as their lifelong careers.
Keywords: career choice, motivations, pre-service teachers, English teaching
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