The purpose of this study was to explore the effectiveness of the native-speaker
teacher’s motivation strategies on 28 middle school students in a small town in Korea. The
participants responded to 48 items that measured their perceptions of motivational strategies
applied by their native-speaker teacher and shared their perspectives with the researcher on
their native-speaker teacher’s motivational strategies. In addition, the researcher held
interview sessions with the native-speaker to understand the teacher’s overall strategies for
keeping her students’ English learning motivation high. The student participants, who held
high levels of instrumental motivation in the beginning of this study remained motivated as
they were encouraged by the native-speaker teacher. They also reported that understanding
the native teacher speech gave them the motivation to learn English. The native-speaker
teacher stated that her students tended to get interested in learning when they were given
various games, familiar stories, and short video clips of various content. Some suggestions
were made with regards to motivating these rural middle school students.