Children and extensive reading motivation

Abstract

Extensive reading (ER), which refers to reading a lot of often self-selected material for information, overall meaning, pleasure, and enjoyment, has been growing in popularity in Asia as an effective way for English as a foreign language (EFL) students to improve reading skills and has provided opportunities for comprehensible input (Nation & Waring, 2013). The focus of this action research (AR) project is on young EFL learners in a private language school setting without a grading system. Therefore, it is important that students be intrinsically motivated to read for the school’s ER program to be successful, specifically, the motivation to check out and read books from a school library. Furthermore, this AR project sought to find whether certain methods can increase students’ intrinsic motivation to read. The research methods include questionnaires, student voice recordings, and empirical data on book-borrowing behaviors. The findings show that indirect, rather than direct, teacher recommendation of books seems to be the most effective method to increase intrinsic motivation to do ER.