محمدهادی محمودی

This qualitative meta-synthesis study aimed to investigate the main factors affecting English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers’ motivation, research methods and designs, and data collection methods used in the studies. To this end, 50 studies investigating EFL teachers’ motivation according to the inclusion/exclusion criteria were chosen as the data. Those data were collected by using some web-sites, databases, search engines, and digital libraries: Science direct, Research Gate, Scopus, google scholar, and ERIC. The data was analyzed using grounded theory and content analysis as the data analysis methods. The result of the study showed that the society-related factors, organizational issues, physical environment and classroom issues, and teachers’ own characteristics and abilities were the most important sub-components. Moreover, the results revealed that qualitative and quantitative studies were among the mostly used research methods and other studies like: mixed-method, longitudinal, case-studies and literature review were not considerable in their frequency. Mostly applied data collection methods were also interviews and questionnaires.