Motivation in the EFL classroom: enhancing reading to Secondary Education students through ICTs

Abstract

One of the most persistent problems that secondary education teachers face in the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom is students’ lack of motivation. However, motivation is essential since it “provides the primary impetus to initiate learning the L2 and later the driving force to sustain the long and often tedious learning process’’ (Dörnyei, 1998:117). For this reason, abundant research has focused on the influence of motivation in learners’ acquisition of a second language (L2) or Foreign Language (FL) throughout the last few decades. In a technological era that has changed the way we teach and learn, the beneficial effects of incorporating Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to boost students’ motivation have also been widely recognised by several studies. Nonetheless, these have scarcely explored the relationship between ICTs and students’ motivation in specific skills, and even less in the case of reading. Bearing this in mind, this paper addresses this issue by firstly analysing the effects of ICTs combined with reading strategies on EFL students’ motivation; and secondly, by determining whether an increase in such motivation is directly beneficial for students’ reading comprehension. A control and an experimental group filled in an initial motivation for reading questionnaire and were later exposed to two different reading lessons within the same Didactic Unit (DU), one being motivational and the other corresponding to the regular teacher’s methodology. The results obtained in a reading evaluation, a self-evaluation and the motivation for reading post-questionnaire will allow us to compare both groups’ reading motivation and grades in the reading evaluation, thus checking to what extent ICTs influence their reading motivation and if a higher motivation has a direct correlation with a better reading comprehension