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Article published In: Language Teaching for Young Learners
Vol. 6:1 (2024) ► pp.104–121

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Practitioner Research Article

Children and extensive reading motivation

An action research project on extensive reading motivation in a private language school

 | BIG BOW English Lab
Published online: 5 February 2024
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ltyl.00046.ito
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, P., & Waring, R. (2013). Extensive reading and graded readers. Compass Publishing.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). 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.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Intrinsic motivation and ER
    • 2.1Book whispering
    • 2.2Teacher Reading Aloud (TRA)
    • 2.3Peer-to-peer Recommendation (PTPR)
  • 3.Research setting and participants
  • 4.Research methods
  • 5.Action research
    • 5.1AR Cycle 1
    • 5.2Action research Cycle 1: Findings
    • 5.3Collection of additional data and analysis
    • 5.4AR Cycle 2
    • 5.5TRA Group
    • 5.6PTPR Group
  • 6.Results: Final questionnaires and book borrowing data
    • 6.1TRA results
    • 6.2PTPR results
    • 6.3TRA and PTPR questionnaire results: Comparison
  • 7.Book borrowing behaviors
  • 8.Writing and presenting
  • 9.Conclusions
  • References
References (25)
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Cited by one other publication

Bonilla-Giménez, Carmen
2025. Fomento de la lectura desde la biblioteca escolar: un estudio sobre el hábito lector y su uso en dos institutos de la Comunidad de Madrid. Revista de Investigación sobre Bibliotecas, Educación y Sociedad 2 ► pp. e100206 ff. DOI logo

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