EXPLORING MOTIVATIONAL CONSTRUCTS IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE READING

This article introduces an instrument that has been developed to explore motivation and attitudes of students towards reading in a foreign language (FL). To develop the instrument, initially 123 students were asked a set of qualitative questions to determine their affective reactions to reading in a FL. A content analysis of emergent data yielded an initial 51-item scale. This scale was administered to 443 FL students at Qanakkale Onsekiz Mart University in Turkey. A factor analysis revealed four factors accounting for 58.70 % of variance in studentsʹ attitudes and motivation towards reading in a FL. These were named as intrinsic value of reading, extrinsic utility value of reading, reading efficacy, and foreign language linguistic utility. The factorial constructs generally overlapped with current theories of reading motivation in the mother tongue with an extra element indicating that reading in a FL is viewed as a linguistic resource for developing language proficiency by foreign language learners.