An Empirical Study On English Reading Motivation Of Senior High School Students

Reading is of great importance as one of the main channels for learners to be exposed to English acquisition.In order to improve the reading ability and scores of foreign language learners,it is not enough to teach students reading strategies and reading patterns.Learners must also have a strong reading motivation.However,compared to a great deal of research on English motivation,little work has been done on reading motivation as a specific domain.Given that,this thesis attempted to investigate the reading achievement and reading motivation of 213 first-grade students in S middle school in Harbin,hoping to make some supplement in this field.Two hundred and thirteen students participated in this study and completed a reading motivation questionnaire adapted from Wigfield and Guthrie's(1999)Motivation for Reading Questionnaire(MRQ)and two English tests.This present study was carried out to answer the following three questions:(1)What are high school students' English reading motivations?(2)What are high school students' English reading achievements?(3)Is there a correlation between high school students' English reading motivation and their English reading scores?With the help of SPSS 21.0 statistical software,descriptive analysis,factor analysis,chi-square test,independent sample t test,one-way analysis of variance,correlation analysis and regression analysis were operated.The results revealed that:(1)The English reading scores of the surveyed high school students are in the middle and top level;girls' English reading achievement is significantly higher than that of boys;the time of extracurricular English reading in high school students was positively correlated with their reading achievement.(2)The surveyed high school students have strong reading motivation;high school students have strong reading motivation;Achievement Value and Goal are important components of high school students' English reading motivation,female students' English reading motivation is obviously higher than that of male students;the Efficacy Belief,Achievement Value and Goal of English reading motivation of senior high school students are greatly influenced by the time of reading activities.(3)High school students' reading motivation was positively correlated with their reading scores,and reached a significant level statistically;the equation is obtained as follows: English reading score =-2.200+0.278* Reading Involvement +0.158* Social Reasons +0.499* Reading Curiosity-0.139* Reading Avoidance +0.319* Reading Effecacy +0.188* Reading Recognition +0.249* Reading Competition.Based on above major findings,some pedagogical implications were drawn and listed as follows:(1)Cultivate students' reading interests;(2)Cultivate students' positive reading psychology,remove psychological barriers,let students“happy reading”;(3)Develop and utilize teaching resources,expand students' knowledge background,and enable students to read extensively.Lastly,the limitations of this present research were discussed and suggestions for future work were also made.