A Data-Driven Approach to Increasing Student Motivation in the Reading Classroom

Reading is widely accepted as one of the most important second-language skills as it offers language learners the opportunity to acquire a variety of lexical items, grammatical structures, and additional schematic knowledge. In an EFL or ESL context, two approaches to teaching reading, intensive and extensive reading, have generally been adopted. When employing intensive reading in a group context, the teacher faces many challenges, e.g., finding material interesting to all students and dealing with mixed levels, individual learner differences, and low motivation. After describing an action research project designed to indicate motivation for reading among two groups of Japanese college students and analyzing the results of that project, the author outlines a nontraditional, more holistic, and student-centered approach to intensive and extensive reading. This approach aims to overcome students’ low intrinsic motivation by adopting a more differentiated learning approach and applying some extensive reading principles to intensive reading. Although the ability to read effectively in a foreign language is widely viewed as one of the most important skills that a foreign language learner can possess, the teaching of reading poses a range of challenges, both pedagogical and logistical. From a pedagogical perspective, issues such as what type of reading should be carried out, what skills are necessary, how to teach these skills, and how to strike a balance between explicit instruction and time on task are still being discussed and researched (see Carrell, Devine, & Eskey, 1988; Hunt & Beglar, 2005; Macalister, 2008; Nation, 2009; Sehlaoui, 2001). For designers of the intensive reading component of a language course, the choice of materials (level, genre, style, and amount) and the grouping of students into levels are two of the biggest issues. Students’ second language levels vary considerably in many foreign language courses, causing many problems for students (Childs, 2002; DelliCarpini, 2006; Prodromou, 1989; Sehlaoui, 2001; Simanova, 2010).