Motivation is the why of behaviour. The word motivation derives from the Latin movere which stands for to move. In other words, motivation is the sum of all that moves a person to action. Everybody needs motivation. Everybody needs to have a reason for action. It is a sad fact that lots of students underachieve when leaning a foreign language because they don’t believe they are capable of reaching their goals. That is why we: psychologists, teachers and parents need to find all the possible ways to offer our students the opportunity to believe in themselves and fulfil their dreams. This article presents a motivation model built by Alan McLean, 2003, that provides a window through which we can observe the impact that different types of classrooms have on student motivation. The author considers that the best form of motivation is self-motivation. There are four drivers that teachers employ to influence student self-motivation: the engagement driver that is responsible for the quality of the relationships between teachers and students as well as between peers, the structure driver, which refers to the clarity of the instructions given by teachers to students, the stimulation driver, which determines the quality of teaching and learning in the classroom and the feed-back driver that tells students how well they are doing. The article describes how teachers use each of the four drivers in order to produce a certain effect on student motivation mindsets. We find this model to be the most applicable and relevant to teaching a foreign language as it offers educational “recipes” and solutions concerning ways of improving the motivation to learn to psychologists, teachers and parents.