A Study Of Junior High School Students' English Reading Motivations

Reading is of great importance as one of the main channels for learners to be exposed to the target language in foreign language acquisition. To improve language learners, reading ability, it is far from enough to teach them various reading models and reading strategies. Much more efforts should be made to motivate students to read in English. However, compared to a great deal of research on L2 motivation, little work has been done on reading motivation as a specific domain. Given that, this thesis attempted to investigate S junior high school students' reading motivation in Chinese setting to serve as a useful supplement to previous studies in this field.Two hundred and twenty-one students participated in this study and completed a reading motivation questionnaire adapted from Wigfield and Guthrie's (1999) Motivation for Reading Questionnaire (MRQ), two English reading tests and had a semi-structured interview. This present study was carried out to answer the following three questions: 1)What are Chinese junior high school students' attitudes toward English reading and their reading preferences? 2) What constitutes Chinese junior high school students' motivation to read in English? 3) What is the relation between Chinese junior high school students'English reading motivation and their reading achievement?With the help of SPSS 17.0 statistical software, descriptive analysis, factor analysis and correlation analysis were operated. The results revealed that: 1) On the whole, junior high school students held positive attitudes toward English reading and they enjoyed a wide range of reading interests and reading materials; 2) Junior high school students' reading motivation was multifaceted and nine factors were identified including Attainment-Intrinsic Value of Reading, Extrinsic Utility Value of Reading, Reading Compliance, Reading Efficacy, Reading Work Avoidance, Reading Challenge, Reading Recognition, Reading for Grades and Reading Materials; 3) Junior high school students'reading motivation was correlated with reading achievement and five out of nine factors including Attainment-Intrinsic Value of Reading, Reading Efficacy, Reading for Grades,Extrinsic Utility Value of Reading and Reading Compliance were significantly and positively correlated with reading achievement and one factor- Reading Work Avoidance had significantly negative correlation with reading outcomes. Further,a semi-structured interview was conducted to partly testify the reliability of research results.Based on the above major findings, some pedagogical implications were drawn and listed as follows: 1) Cultivate students' reading interests; 2) Enhance students' reading self-efficacy; 3) Stimulate students'Grade-related Extrinsic Utility Value of Reading English. Lastly, the limitations of this present research were discussed and suggestions for future work were also made.