This study attempts to investigate the perceptions of the Korean and native English speaking instructors teaching English in Korean universities toward the importance of motivational strategies and how far their students feel motivated when their teachers use these motivational strategies. In total, 78 instructors and 220 university students with two different English proficiency levels participated in this study and responded to questionnaires. Both Korean and native English speaking instructors' perceptions toward the importance of motivational strategies have a similar pattern. In the responses of both groups, the top three important motivational strategies are proper teacher behavior, recognizing students' effort and promoting learners' self-confidence The lowest rank-ordered strategy is promoting learner autonomy. Instructors' perceptions of importance and students' degree of motivational state show a similar pattern and there are no significant differences between the lower and higher level students except the difference in the mean scores.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the demotivating factors of students attending a university located in a local area in Korea. The interviews with 17 students who are in three different proficiency groups reveal 8 demotivating factors: 'learning difficulty', 'exam-oriented class', 'low test scores', 'low confidence', 'memorization', 'learning material', 'teacher', and 'grammar translation method'. The main demotivating factor is 'learning difficulty'. Half of the students who mentioned this state that they experienced the learning difficulty when they advanced to middle school from elementary school. The majority of other demotivating factors are closely related to the Korean education system under which both teachers and students do not have much autonomy. The 'teacher' factor which was identified as the main demotivating factor in other studies conducted in western countries is not the main demotivator in this paper. In the distribution of demotivating factors, there do not exist any big differences among the different proficiency groups but it is shown that the low proficiency students experienced demotivation earlier than the higher proficiency students.