Motivational strategies cannot be employed successfully in a ‘motivational vacuum’ - certain preconditions must be in place before any further attempts to generate motivation can be effective. In my experience, the following three motivational conditions in particular are indispensable:

• appropriate teacher behaviours and a good relationship with the students;

• a pleasant and supportive classroom atmosphere;

• a cohesive learner group with appropriate group norms.

Of course, the three conditions are interrelated because, for example, you cannot have a pleasant classroom climate if there is tension between you and the students, but it is useful to look at them one by one.

Appropriate teacher behaviours

In 1998, Kata Csizer and I conducted a survey (Dornyei and Csizer 1998) among Hungarian teachers of English to find out what they thought of various motivational techniques and how often they used them in their own teaching practice. In order to even out the different personal views, we included a relatively large number of practitioners (N = 200) from diverse contexts (ranging from primary school instructors teaching beginners to university lecturers teaching English majors) and then summarised their responses. The survey revealed that the participants considered the teacher's own behaviour to be the single most important motivational tool. Furthermore, the results also exposed that this ‘tool’ was one of the most under-utilised motivational resources in the teacher's classroom practice.