CAR: A Means for Motivating Students to Read

Reading is an important skill for English language learners in today’s world; it supports the development of overall proficiency and provides access to crucial infor-mation at work and in school. With English being the dominant language of the Internet, international business, and academia (including science), beginning and advanced students alike face pressures to develop their second language (L2) reading abilities. The acquisition of reading skills, however, is never easy, and students need consistent practice to become fluent readers. Successful readers have to solve many puzzles, such as learning to recognize unfamiliar letters, words, syntax, and discourse patterns. These challenges can be overcome more eas-ily if students are highly motivated to read. But what can teachers do to motivate students to read in English? Some research on this subject points to successful methods and techniques, such as choosing reading topics that appeal to students, assigning material and tasks at the right level, organiz-ing collaborative work, and offering positive feedback and other incen-tives for students ’ efforts. However, in their efforts to motivate students to read, teachers often do not realize that different instructional methods actu-ally promote different types of student motivation. The purpose of this article is to distinguish among these differ-ent types of motivation and illustrate how to apply motivation-supportive instructional strategies in the class-room to create a dynamic environment where reading comes alive. Motivational orientations When students read in an L2, the experience can easily become over-whelming when students lack vocabu-lary, grammar, and content knowledge. These frustrating reading experiences can result in decreased motivation to read in the L2—a truly unfortunate consequence considering the impor-tance of reading for most of our stu-dents. Nurturing students ’ motivation to read, therefore, should be an essen-tial part of L2 reading instruction. The complexity of motivation as a behavioral construct has compelled researchers to identify different type