The goal of this work is to understand more about motivation in foreign language (FL) learning and the role that teachers play as to benefit it. In order to develop this work, research was done on the definition of motivation; its importance to the FL teaching environment and on what could be the role for teachers as motivators. The presuppositions selected to guide this study were: motivation is needed for everything we do and it is crucial for learning a FL (USHIODA 1996, DÖRNYEI, 2001b; TAIPA; FITA 2003, PINK, 2010); the motivation for learning a FL is different from the motivation needed for other types of study (GARDNER, 2001; BROWN, 2007); motivation is dynamic and temporal and because of this it has phases that involve its generating, maintenance, and protection and the evaluation of past learning
situations (DÖRNYEI, 2000); the teacher has an important role to enable motivation to benefit learning (USHIODA,1996; BURDEN, 2000; DÖRNYEI, 2001a; TAIPA; FITA, 2003). The research participants were all teachers from an undergraduate university course. A qualitative approach was predominantly used to register their points of view from narratives, questionnaires and interviews that were later systematized and analyzed. The results emphasize the need for teachers to improve their theoretical knowledge on how to benefit motivation in the FL classroom and present various possibilities for doing so.
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