Why Teaching?: Factors Influencing Pre-Service EFL Teachers' Decisions to Become Teachers

This study aimed to investigate what factors affected pre-service EFL teachers' entry motivations into the teaching profession and whether they differed across their grades. In the study, which adopted a quantitative approach, data were collected from 212 pre-service EFL teachers at a state university through the FIT-Choice Scale. The data were analyzed with descriptive statistics, Kruskal-Wallis test, and one-way ANOVA. The findings showed that what attracted pre-service EFL teachers to teaching was their desire to shape future generations and to contribute to the society as well as demands of teaching and their prior teaching and learning experiences. Another finding of the study was that there were statistically significant differences across grades in some of the factors including but not limited to perceived teaching abilities, intrinsic value, and social utility value. Findings of the study have considerable importance in view of the recent developments regarding teacher quality around the world. (c) Association of Applied Linguistics. All rights reserved.