Understanding Reading Motivation From EAP Students’ Categorical Work in a Focus Group

Abstract

This article uses insights and methods from ethnomethodological conversation analysis (CA) and membership categorization analysis (MCA) to explore reading motivation as a topic (Burch, 2016). With the results of CA and MCA of the participants' categorical work in their interactions in a focus group setting, this study outlines how enthusiastic readers talk about their experience with and opinions about extensive reading (ER) and how they use their talk for interactive purposes in the focus group. The author shows how participants developed different positioned categories of a particular kind of reader while displaying their own stances toward the ER experience and reading behaviors. The author also shows how they changed their stances toward voluntary reading and how they assigned different propositions to their experience with ER while accomplishing agreement on two points: that voluntary reading is enjoyable but subject to time constraints. This study portrays a complex picture of reading motivation as related to different kinds of identity work and the moral responsibilities associated with certain identities. Post-analytically, the author suggests pedagogical implications of what the participants' categories say about issues related to the ER teaching principles in an English for academic purposes context. R esearch on extensive reading (ER) has provided abundant evidence of positive affective, cognitive, and behavioral effects on students' second language (L2) reading in a variety of educational contexts. For example, studies on ER and affect have demonstrated improved student attitudes and motivation (e.g.

Discovering External Motivation in EFL Students Toward Word Target and Reading Pleasure Using Xreading Application

“…The word-target as a learning assessment, in fact, does not seem to align with the ten principles of extensive reading proposed by (Day & Bamford, 2002) emphasizing reading for pleasure, freedom of reading choice and reading as its own reward. However, the implementation of extensive reading needs to consider the context where it is used (Ro, 2018;Walker, 2020). As a result, giving reading credit as the primary component of a student's grade becomes crucial from an external perspective, especially in Asia where reading in foreign languages is difficult and voluntary reading is given less importance than other tasks (Lake, 2014;Milliner & Cote, 2014;Mori, 2015;Ramonda, 2020) In order to understand motivation, learning, and self-regulation, this study employs the socialcognitive view, which examines students' experiences from this point of view (Schunk & DiBenedetto, 2019).…”

“…Students who can determine and choose reading according to their own level of ability (Yamashita, 2008) will read faster and feel happier (Ro, 2018). Therefore, indirectly this is a form of external motivation that encourages EFL students to continue reading and complete their reading assignments (Indrayadi, 2021).…”