On Relationships Among Reading Motivation, Reading Strategy And Reading Achievement Of Non-English Majors

Recently, researchers have shifted their attention from seeking the best teaching approaches to studying learners' individual differences. More and more researchers agree that the following are important variables in which individual learners may differ: intelligence, language aptitude, learning strategies, and attitudes towards the target language and its native speakers (Liu Runqing, 2004). It indicates that the previous researches on these variables have proved to be helpful in understanding the L 2 learning process (Skehan, 1989).Reading is an important and useful approach to the English learning and acquisition. Reading materials can provide not only paradigm for English writing, but also language context by which students may improve their sentence making and text comprehension. However, readers diversify with each other greatly in many aspects of reading. Based on the previous research and the relevant theories, this study focuses on two of reading variables---reading motivation and reading strategies, and aims at exploring their relationship and their relationship with learners' reading proficiency.The study was conducted on 100 non-English majors from three departments in Shanghai Normal University. Two questionnaires and a test were used in an attempt to identify students' reading motivation, reading strategies, reading proficiency, and to find out the relationship among them.Seven hypotheses are formulated as the basis to explore potential relationships among reading achievement, reading motivation and reading strategies. The Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS version 13. 0) is used for the statistical analysis of the data, including descriptive statistics, correlations, and independent-sample test. The findings are as follows:1) There is positive and close correlation between reading motivation and reading strategy. Among all the four sub-reading motivations, intrinsic reading motivation gets the highest Pearson correlation coefficient with the meta-cognitive reading strategy. And the meta-cognitive has a significant correlation with the reading achievement. Extrinsic reading motivation has a relative high correlation with the affirmative reading strategy. Subjects who have a clear goal of learning have better self control ability.2) The correlation between the reading motivation and the reading achievement is higher than that between reading strategy and the reading achievement. Among the four reading motivations, the reading efficacy has the highest correlation with the final reading achievement, and the intrinsic reading motivation has a higher Pearson correlation coefficient with the final reading achievement than the extrinsic reading motivation.3) Among the four sub-reading strategies, the cognitive reading strategy has the lowest correlation with reading achievement, while the affirmative reading strategy has the highest.4) There is no significant difference of reading motivation between the females and the males, while the females have stronger intention to use reading strategy than their male counterparts. As for the difference between high-score group and low-score group in reading motivation and strategy, there both exist significant difference.These findings have been discussed from different perspectives and possible reasons have been provided. Furthermore, some implications and suggestions for future research and teaching have been put forward. It is suggested that teachers should know students' reading motivation to predict the students' potential easiness and hardships in mastering and using the reading strategies. Reading strategy training is necessary in the language learning. A successful teacher may not merely provide specific strategies, but help to develop an awareness to use strategies to deal with problems.