Improving Intrinsic Motivation in Reading: Effects of Reading Strategies Instruction

Group members

陳毓茜 (Nancy)

鐘晨嫚 (Edith)

宋盛郁 (Ellen)

Chapter 1Introduction

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.”

The statement of problem

• The aim of this quasi- experimental

study is to investigate the effects of

reading strategies that relates to intrinsic

motivation in reading.

• This study is to aim to provide profound

insight to EFL reading and gain deeper

understanding of how these two reading

strategies effect English major students’

intrinsic motivation in reading.

Hypotheses

1. The students provided with reading strategies

have higher intrinsic motivation in reading.

2. The use of finding specific information

strategy can improve their intrinsic motivation

in reading.

3. There is a difference between the use of

finding specific information and drawing

conclusions.

Definition of terms• Intrinsic motivation

• Intrinsic motivation is defined as the

doing of an activity for its inherent

satisfactions rather than for some

separable consequence. (Deci＆ Ryan,

2000)

• Reading strategies

• Strategies include processes for

enhancing reading comprehension and

overcoming comprehension failure.

(Knight, et al, 1985)

Chapter 2Literature Review• The effects of reading strategy

• When learners use reading strategies,

they may construct better reading

comprehension. This reading process

means that they could read beyond the

lines and to think critically (Shelton,

2006).

Literature Review

• The role of intrinsic motivation and reading strategy

• Pintrich and his colleagues studied the

relationships between students’

motivation and strategy use (Pintrich,

1989; Pintrich and De Groot, 1990).

Based on a general expectancy-value

framework, Pintrich (1989) proposed that

students'' motivation consists of three

components: expectancy, value, and

affect.

Literature Review

• Reading Strategy Instruction

• The research (Durkin, 1979) revealed

that teachers actually devoted only 2% of

the classroom time to teach students

how to comprehend what they read.

• To become strategy users, they need

‘‘systematically orchestrated instruction

or training’’ (Alexander, 1996).

Literature Review

• Finding Specific Information

strategy

• According to Grellet & Hadley’s skimming

theory, in a reading process, struggling

readers may raise many questions in

their mind. When they asked of many

questions about the content, the author,

the events, the issues, and the ideas,

they try to find information for answering

questions quickly in their thoughts

Literature Review

• The Strategy of Drawing Conclusion based on clues in the text

• According to the writer Susan Hall (1990), she stressed that “inferring allows readers to make their own discoveries without the direct comment of the author.” That is, inferring relates to the notion of reading between the lines. Readers can make guesses or appropriate inferences about underlying themes in the text or make predication for next theme.

Chapter 3Defined Population

• The defined population includes all

students from English Department at

Providence University.

Participants

• One hundred and six students from two

freshmen classes of English Department

at Providence University voluntarily

participated in this study.

• Their ages were from eighteen to twenty-

one years old.

The demographical information

Experimental group Control group0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

45

50

MaleFemale

The demographical information

Experimental group

Control group36

38

40

42

44

46

48

50

Learning ex-perience in cram schools

Experience in Taking exams for English pro-ficiency

Why we choose freshmen?

• First, with regard to their general

performance in English reading, half of

students, reported that their general

reading performance was good.

• Second, as for learning motivation, most

of students from the two classes

indicated that they had high motivation

in English reading.

Strategy of inquiry

• This study is a quasi-experimental, pretest/posttest, control group

design.

Treatment

• First, 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.

Treatment

• Second, 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.

Instrumentation

• A motivation and strategy questionnaire,

based on the work of Oxford (1989),

Hung, H., Tsou, W., & Wu, K. Y. (2005),

Chen, Y. R. (2007), Yang, N. D. (1992,

2002), was used to investigate students’

motivation and reading strategies.

Reliability

• Cronbach‘s Alpha .715

(the items of motivation )

• Cronbach‘s Alpha .764

(the items of reading strategy )

Validity

• The questionnaire includes two parts. In

part 1, there were 13 questions about

intrinsic motivation toward English, and 5

items about reading were grouped in a

section. In part 2, 16 questions about

reading strategies were listed in the

questionnaire, in which 5 questions about

finding specific information and 3

questions about drawing conclusions.

Procedure of data collection

pre-test questionnair

e Instruction1

Finding specific

information

Reading test 1

Instruction 2Drawing

conclusions

Reading Test 2

posttestquestion

naire

Method of data analysis

• The descriptive statistics and statistical

analyses for measuring students’ intrinsic

motivation, reading strategies, and the

demographic information were performed

using Statistical Package for Social

Sciences (SPSS).

• Reliability of motivation and strategy

questionnaire Cronbach‘s Alpha

• T-test

Chapter 4Finding

motivation posttest

motivation pretest

0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5

pt

Finding

• The chart shows 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.

Finding

control group

experimental group

3.2 3.4 3.6 3.8 4

finding specific information drawing con-clusions

Finding

• It revealed that there is a significant

difference between the use of finding

specific information and drawing

conclusions in two groups, p<.05.

Chapter 5Discussion

• Hypothesis 1

• The students provided with reading

strategies have higher intrinsic

motivation in reading.

Discussion

• 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.

Discussion

• Hypothesis 2

• The use of finding specific

information strategy can improve

their intrinsic motivation in reading.

Discussion

• 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.

Discussion

• This finding is in line with Grellet (1981)

and Hadley’s (1993) skimming theory.

Because of learning experiences and

human willingness, the learners would

want to use finding specific information

strategy for answering questions quickly

to express their thoughts.

Discussion

• Hypothesis 2

• There is a difference between the

use of finding specific information

and drawing conclusions.

Discussion

• In the finding of this study, the learners

were more willingness to use drawing

conclusion strategy than finding specific

information.

Discussion

• 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.

Limitations

• 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.

Limitations

• 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.