Studies on motivation increased gradually after Gardner and Lambert (1972) proposed their classic concepts of integrative motivation and instrumental motivation. However, there is no universally accepted definition on motivation until now because of its complexity (Han and Yin, 2016). For example, Kleinginna and Kleinginna (1981) classified existing motivation definitions into nine categories in light of their focuses. By drawing upon various definitions, Dörnyei and Ushioda (2011) concluded that direction and magnitude of human behavior were the two dimensions most researchers agreed for defining motivation. In other words, motivation stipulated the reasons why individuals are determined to do an activity, the length they will sustain the activity and the efforts they are going to make for this activity.

Apart from motivation, its dark sides were also frequently investigated in related studies. Currently, amotivation and demotivation were often applied to express the meaning that people work or study with decreased motivation in existing studies (e.g., Balkis, 2018; Wu et al., 2020; Albalawi and Al-Hoorie, 2021). Amotivation was firstly used in self-determination theory (Deci and Ryan, 1985), where it was defined as the relative absence of motivation that is caused by an individual’s feelings of incompetence and helplessness when faced with an activity. For example, when encountered with unmasterable situations, people would suffer from helplessness, depression, listlessness, and self-disparagement, which would lead to the decrease of motivation. Compared with amotivation, demotivation was more frequently used by researchers in second language acquisition (SLA) field (Ren, 2022). Dörnyei and Ushioda (2011, p. 139) once defined demotivation as “specific external forces that reduce or diminish the motivational basis of a behavioral intention or an ongoing action.” They compared the two terms of amotivation and demotivation, and thought amotivation is related to some unrealistic expectations, while demotivation is linked with specific external reasons. In fact, neither the definitions of the two terms could cover the complex phenomenon of motivation decrease among college EFL teachers. For example, several researchers (e.g., Sakai and Kikuchi, 2009; Clare et al., 2019) disagreed with Dörnyei and Ushioda (2011)’s definition of demotivation and included both internal and external factors when they were investigating demotivation. In this demotivational study, both the scopes of “demotivation” and “amotivation” were included. However, considering the terminology of “demotivation” was more frequently used in L2-related research articles than “amotivation” (see Table 1), this paper applied the term “demotivation,” though the definition was slightly different from that in the great book of Dörnyei and Ushioda (2011).

Based on the above considerations, college EFL teachers’ DTCR was defined as low or decreased investment and engagement in conducting research because of both internal and external factors in this study. This definition was drawn upon and synthesized from the studies conducted by Clare et al. (2019), Sakai and Kikuchi (2009), Pishghadam et al. (2021), Deci and Ryan (1985), and Dörnyei and Ushioda (2011), etc.

There were several studies conducted to explore EFL teachers’ demotivation in various educational stages. For example, Yaghoubinejad et al. (2017) found the major demotivating factors for Iranian junior high school English teachers included lack of social recognition and respect, few adequate rewards, lack of supports or understanding regarding English education, and a large number of students in a single English class. Kim et al. (2014) compared the differences of demotivating factors between English teachers (in elementary and junior high schools) in China and South Korea. Their study indicated that large English class size was the common detrimental factor for English teachers in the two countries. But there existed some different demotivating factors for English teachers in the two countries. For example, only English teachers in China perceived “excessive interference or expectations of school parents” was a demotivating factor, while “large amounts of administrative tasks and students’ lack of interest” were found to be the demotivating factors for English teachers in South Korea. Similarly, Baniasad-Azad and Ketabi (2013) compared the factors causing English teachers’ demotivation in Iran and Japan, and found some analogous and different underlying factors. In addition, Ozturk (2021) went even further and investigated only one ability of English teachers (i.e., assessment) in the teaching process and uncovered the reasons for EFL teachers’ demotivation to be more assessment literate in Turkey.

However, most of the existing research only focused on investigating the underlying factors or reasons causing EFL teachers’ demotivation in their language teaching, but few explored their DTCR. Therefore, research on EFL teachers’ DTCR should be strengthened. First, teachers’ teaching and research are distinct in several dimensions, though they are often interrelated with each other (Cochran-Smith and Lytle, 1990; Liu et al., 2010). Research on teachers’ demotivation to teach might not provide enough information for understanding their DTCR. Hence, the different properties between teaching and research require studies specifically on research demotivation. In addition, teaching and research are the two most fundamental functions of universities, and they are the two sides of college teachers’ identities (Liu et al., 2010). Therefore, both demotivation of teaching and research deserve attentions in studies. Third and practically, universities tend to encourage and press their teaching staff to conduct academic research to gain competitiveness in the world university rankings and other various evaluations (Mägi and Beerkens, 2016). These practical research policies, regulations or requirements need more attentions paid on EFL teachers’ DTCR. For example, the factors causing EFL teachers’ DTCR and the solutions to overcome this problem and remotivate them should be investigated.

People’s (de)motivation was a changeable and dynamic process (e.g., see Waninge et al., 2014; Song and Kim, 2016; Zheng et al., 2020; Wang and Littlewood, 2021), but current studies seldom considered the fluctuation of teachers’ motivation of conducting research. Most of the motivation studies were conducted to delve into the factors underlying their motivational behaviors (e.g., see Bai and Hudson, 2011; Borg and Liu, 2013; Yuan et al., 2016), but little research paid attention to the motivation tendency in EFL teachers’ long teaching career. Therefore, to have a better understanding of the overall characteristics of this dynamic phenomenon, studies should be conducted to investigate the changing process of EFL teachers’ (de)motivation.

Ecological systems theory (EST) was proposed by Bronfenbrenner (1979), which has changed the approaches for conducting research on the relations between human beings and their surrounding environments among numerous behavioral scientists and sociologists (Ceci, 2006, p. 173). Ecological systems were composed of a set of homocentric and nested sub-systems, including microsystems, mesosystems, exosystems, and macrosystem based on the extent of closeness between a person and the corresponding systems. Microsystems refer to those activities, roles, and interpersonal relations sensed by the progressing human being in a particular setting. Mesosystems are founded on the microsystems, and for a mesosystem, it is composed of the interrelations among two or more settings where the progressing human being directly take part. Exosystems are the settings that are not directly related to the progressing human being. However, those indirect settings could still impact or be impacted by the progressing person through the connecting person or even systems. Macrosystem refers to the setting at the culture or sub-culture levels. The above three lower-order systems are embedded in macrosystem. Macrosystem could be the underlying belief or ideologies for the above three systems (for more details, see Bronfenbrenner, 1979).

Although EST was originally proposed to explain the influences of environment on children’s development (Graves and Sheldon, 2018), this theory has been gradually drawn upon as a theoretical framework to guide the studies of teacher education. For example, Hwang (2014) delved into how ecological contexts influence South Korean teacher educators’ professional development and found global, political, social and institutional contexts could exert impacts on their development. Price and McCallum (2015) applied this theoretical framework to investigate teachers’ well-being and “fitness” among 120 pre-service teachers and concluded that ecological influences were regarded to impact on their well-being and competence to be suitable for sustainable performance. Mohammadabadi et al. (2019) inspected the factors influencing cognition among EFL teachers at various levels and found ecological factors at microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem and macrosystem levels could be the causes underlying their cognition. Therefore, EST could be applied as an appropriate theoretical framework in the research of EFL teachers. In addition, people’s behaviors are usually influenced by different environment factors (e.g., see Rubenstein et al., 2018), indicating that ecological perspectives should be considered when the reasons and solutions for EFL teachers’ DTCR were investigated.

Based on the review of the current studies and theories, this study aims to answer the following research questions:

Research instruments applied in this study include questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. The questionnaire included three sections, i.e., basic information (Section 1), identifying question and motivational change graph (Section 2), and 7-point Likert scales (Section 3). The first section aimed to induce the information of college English teachers’ basic information, including age, teaching experience, etc. In the second section, the participants were firstly asked to indicate whether they had experience of DTCR and then to draw lines or carves on the motivation change graph. The motivation change graph was firstly created by Jung (2011) in his investigation of students’ motivational changes and was adopted by Wang and Littlewood (2021) and Song and Kim (2017) when they were delving into the dynamics of students’ demotivation. In this study, this instrument was used to stimulate college EFL teachers to chart their motivation changes over their teaching career. They were guided to dot to indicate their motivational levels from very boring (−2) to very interesting (+2) at a particular year in their teaching experience and then to draw graphs by linking those separated dots. The teachers who had more than 20 years’ teaching experience were only required to display their first 20 years’ experience. In Figure 1, one EFL teacher’s motivational changing track for conducting research was demonstrated. As demonstrated in this curve, this teacher had 8 years’ teaching experience, during which her motivation levels of conducting research fluctuated. Specifically, she was quite demotivated in conducting research at the beginning of her career but increased her motivation sharply in the 2nd and 3rd years. However, her motivation decreased gradually from the 3rd to 7th years but were followed by a rapid increase during the 6th to 8th years.

The last section was a scale with 20 factors that might underlie college EFL teachers’ DTCR. This scale was designed based on questionnaires and qualitative data in former related studies (e.g., Yang et al., 2001; Borg and Liu, 2013; Chen and Wang, 2013; Kim et al., 2014; Peng, 2019). The whole questionnaire was displayed in the Appendix. This questionnaire was firstly reviewed and checked by several EFL English teachers and questionnaire designing experts to ensure its appropriateness. The corrected version was then distributed to participants in this study.

The semi-structured interviews were used to induce solutions to overcome DTCR and remotivate college EFL teachers to conduct research. The interview questions were all revolving around how to motivate them and reduce their DTCR. Since all the interviewees were native Chinese, the interviews were conducted in Chinese to improve communication efficiency. Informed consent was given to each interviewee before the interviews, and the interviews lasted from 17 to 46 min.

This study adopted simple random sampling to select college EFL teachers in three types of universities¹ in a city of central China. The paper questionnaires were sent to college English teachers in 10 universities. A total of 400 questionnaires were sent and 339 English teachers returned the questionnaires, among which 318 questionnaires were valid. In valid samples, 216 teachers indicated they had experienced of DTCR, among which 163 (75.46%) participants were female and the other 53 (24.54%) were male teachers. With regards to their age, those teachers ranged from 25 to 66 (mean 37.39, SD 9.77). Specifically, 52 (24.07%) English teachers were in their 20s, 106 (49.07%) were in their 30s, and 58 (26.85%) were in their 40s or above. As for their teaching experience, 75 teachers taught English <5 years, 86 taught 6–10 years, and 55 taught more than 10 years. The majority of them (185 teachers, accounting for 85.65%) hold master’s degrees, and 25 (11.57%) were PhD holders, and the other 6 (2.78%) teachers only hold bachelor’s degrees. Although the participants were teaching English courses in universities, they graduated from different majors: 87 (40.28%) teachers majored in English education or teaching, 55 (25.46%) majored in translation, 39 (18.06%) majored in linguistics, and 29 (13.43%) majored in English literature. While the other 6 (2.78%) teachers were from non-English related majors, like international politics, food science and engineering, management, etc.

This study adopted purposive sampling (Merriam and Tisdell, 2015) and interviewed 12 English teachers and 3 officers administering teachers’ academic research projects in universities. Those participants included ordinary EFL teachers who were fairly demotivated and motivated in research, a PhD supervisor in EFL field, and several research project managers. The basic information of those participants was demonstrated in Table 2.

In this study, 318 valid questionnaires were numbered firstly, and they were the foundation to draw the general motivation change track of EFL teachers. To this end, the motivation level of each teacher in every year was noted and the average motivation level in each year was calculated, and then those average values were dotted and linked on the chart.

In the valid questionnaires, 216 English teachers indicated that they suffered from DTCR in their career. The demotivational reasons in the 216 questionnaires were analyzed by exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to figure out the factors underlying EFL teachers’ DTCR.

In addition, this study interviewed 15 English teachers and officers in charge of teachers’ academic research, and all the interviews were permitted be recorded. The recorded interviews were transcribed into texts by https://www.iflyrec.com/zhuanwenzi.html, and were proofread by the researcher. Those texts were then input into NVivo 12 Plus to analyze. Thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006) were applied to analyze the 15 files, and they were iteratively read coded, compared, categorized, and integrated.

This study drew a general motivation fluctuation graph to demonstrate EFL teachers’ motivation changes of conducting academic research. Every teacher’s motivation value was noted down based on their teaching experience (years), and finally an average curve of those 318 EFL teachers’ motivation levels were drafted (see Figure 2).

This curve demonstrated the general tendency of EFL teachers’ motivation to conduct academic research. It could be found from the curve that teachers’ overall motivation levels were not very high, and the average curve never surpassed 1 during teachers’ 20 years’ teaching experience (Clearly, there were 2 summits of motivation in the curve at the years of 3 and 8. But neither of them exceeded “interesting” level.). In addition, this curve even exhibited that EFL teachers generally had low motivation to conduct academic research in three periods (1st year, 4th to 5th years, and 10th to 12th years) in their career, with motivation level below 0. Apart from the overall motivation levels in each year, this curve also displayed some fluctuations in EFL teachers’ teaching career, especially before the year of 12. For example, there were 2 significant declines in the curve (3rd to 5th year, and 8th to 11th year). Since DTCR covers both low investment and interests in academic research and gradually decreased investment and interests in it, generally 9 years (i.e., 1st year, 3rd to 5th years, and 8th to 12th years) could be named as DTCR years in EFL teachers’ career. Therefore, it could be concluded from the curve that college EFL teachers in China were very likely to suffer from DTCR in their teaching career.

Table 3 demonstrated the results of KMO and Bartlett’s test of sphericity. The KMO value reached 0.908, and the Sig. ratio of Bartlett’s test was 0.000 < 0.05. indicating that it was suitable to run factor analysis.

This study applied the method of principal components to extract factors based on Eigenvalues greater than 1. In addition, varimax was chosen as the method in rotation. This study extracted 5 components, explaining 78.02% of the total variance. Therefore, the 5 components could reasonably represent the original data. The rotated component matrix was displayed in Table 4. The factors were named based on the contents of the items affiliated to them. For example, item 5, 9 and 20 indicated that EFL teachers’ DTCR was because of their insufficient time, academic resources and social connections. Therefore, the corresponding factors were named as “insufficient research resources.”

Cronbach Alpha coefficient for the reliability of the scale was 0.934. In addition, Cronbach Alpha and Omega coefficients for the five factors were displayed in Table 5.

These scores showed that Cronbach Alpha and Omega coefficients for each factor were quite high. These results could be regarded as an indicator that the scale was reliable.

The EFA results indicated that EFL teachers were demotivated by five factors for their DTCR, including weak research ability, negative emotions and attitudes, poor research surroundings, research management problems and insufficient resources. These findings demonstrated that, besides EFL teachers’ own factors (i.e., weak research abilities, negative emotions, and attitudes), external factors could also cause their DTCR.

This study interviewed 12 EFL teachers and 3 officers administrating college teachers’ research and academic projects. The 15 interviews were transcribed into Chinese texts and were analyzed through thematic analysis method (Braun and Clarke, 2006). Based on the steps of thematic analysis, the interview data was firstly coded with blank mind. Overall, 36 initial codes were generated, and those codes were further abstracted into 7 themes. Some examples of coding results and processes were displayed in Table 6.

From the themes generated from suggestions, it could be concluded that four stakeholders were involved to overcome EFL teachers’ DTCR, including universities, research communities, government, and publishers. After analyzing the underlying logic of the suggestions proposed for overcoming EFL teachers’ DTCR, this study drew a mind map (see Figure 3) to demonstrate the relations between different suggestions.

Drawing upon ecological systems theory (Bronfenbrenner, 1979), this study constructed an ecological model to demonstrate the relations among stakeholders who could make efforts for overcoming EFL teachers’ DTCR (Figure 4) based on the thematic analysis results.

This model demonstrated that different stakeholders (including government, publishers, universities, and research communities) in EFL teachers’ working ecology could help them to overcome their DTCR. For example, universities could decrease teachers’ teaching loads to give them more time to conduct research; academic leaders could give advice to novice researchers on their academic activities. What was noteworthy was that measures could also be taken among those stakeholders (except EFL teachers per se) to promote teachers’ research behaviors. For instance, government could issue some regulations to prohibit some journals’ academic misconduct, such as selling publication qualification to teachers.