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Improving Intrinsic Motivation in Reading: Effects of Reading Strategies InstructionLing Ling Yen, Chen-Man Chung, Yu-Chian Chen, Sheng-Yu Sung

Department of English Language, Literature and Linguistics Providence University, Taichung, Taiwan

IntroductionReading 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.”

Results

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)

.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)

pre-test questionnaire

Instruction1Finding specific

information

Reading test 1

Instruction 2Drawing

conclusions

Reading Test 2

posttestquestionnai

re

Figure 1 Figure 2

Figure 3

Aims

Hypotheses

Discussion

Conclusion

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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)

Figure 5

Figure 4The aim of this quasi- experimental study is to investigate the effects of reading strategies that relates to intrinsic motivation in reading.

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.

The students provided with reading strategies have higher intrinsic motivation in reading.

The use of finding specific information strategy can improve their intrinsic motivation in reading. There is a difference between the use of finding specific information and drawing

conclusions.