Improving Intrinsic Motivation in Reading: Effects of Reading Strategies Instruction

1. Improving Intrinsic Motivation in Reading: Effects of Reading Strategies Instruction Ling Ling Yen, Chen-Man Chung, Yu-Chian Chen, Sheng-Yu Sung Department of English Language, Literature and Linguistics Providence University, Taichung, Taiwan Introduction Results • Reading strategies are as tactics that readers use to engage and comprehend text. (Paris, Wasik, and Turner, 1996) • Block (1992) stressed that “strategies reveal a reader’s resources for comprehending a text, including how readers conceive a text, what textual cue they attend to, how they make sense of what they read, and what they do when they don’t understand.” • It showed no difference between the experimental and control groups in the pretest related to reading motivation, t (95) = .55, p>.05. It revealed that there is a significant difference between the two groups in the posttest related to reading motivation, t (95) = 2.33, p<.05. (Figure 4) Aims Figure 4 • The aim of this quasi- experimental study is to investigate the effects of reading strategies that relates to intrinsic motivation in reading. • It revealed that there is a significant difference between the use of finding specific information and drawing conclusions in two groups, p<.05. (Figure 5) • It also aim to provide profound insight to EFL reading and deeply understand of how these two reading strategies effect English major students’ intrinsic motivation in reading. Hypotheses • The students provided with reading strategies have higher intrinsic motivation in reading. Figure 5 • The use of finding specific information strategy can improve their intrinsic motivation in reading. Discussion • There is a difference between the use of finding specific information and drawing conclusions. Hypothesis 1: According to Ryan and Deci (2000), intrinsic motivation is viewed as human willingness to engage in tasks. In the posttest, there was a significant difference between using reading strategies and learners’ intrinsic motivation. One guess is that the learners are willingness to use reading strategies to do the test better. They may think that using strategies is useful in their reading process. Methods Population: It includes all students from English Department at Providence University. One hundred and six students from two freshmen classes in the university. Their ages were from eighteen to twenty-one years old. (Figure 1 & 2) Hypothesis 2: Based on the results of data analysis, there is a significant relationship between finding specific information and learners’ intrinsic motivation. Their intrinsic motivation was high in the posttest. • Methodology : This study is a quasi-experimental, pretest/posttest, control group design . • The treatment group (Class B) received the instruction of finding specific information. We provided the methods of using the strategy of finding specific information, such as providing many questions about the content, thinking about Wh- questions (Why? Where? What? Who? How?), and highlighting the information they found. • The treatment group received the instruction of drawing conclusions, including inferential thinking, questions to generate a conclusion about an underlying theme, and trying to make a conclusion from the questions. (Figure 3) . Hypothesis 3: In the finding of this study, the learners were more willingness to use drawing conclusion strategy than finding specific information. In the finding of this study, the learners were more willingness to use drawing conclusion strategy than finding specific information. Regarding the influence of English proficiency levels, Susan Hall (1990) stressed that inferring allows advanced level of readers to make their own discoveries without direction. Conversely, poor level of readers may try to find answers quickly. To summarize, in the study, the advanced level of readers may tend to predict while reading English text than the poor readers. Conclusion • First, a random selection is suggested before the study is conducted, thereby the findings could be used to generalize the population of this study. • Secondly, time for tests was too short, some students may have the anxiety such as the nerves to do the tests that interrupted or impeded their thinking. • Thirdly, it is better to conduct the long-time experiment to observe student’s motivation changes using reading strategies several times. This quasi-experimental study is a short-time study and it measures students’ reading ability only one time, so the result may be unable to reflect the real effect of the experiment. Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3