Authentic or Artificial Materials: The Effects of Material-Types on L2 Motivation
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Akira Shirai
Abstract
This preliminary study sets out to examine the extent to which authentic materials affect Japanese university students’ classroom motivation, seeking an effective way to teach mixedlevel language classes at universities. The motivation questionnaires consisting of eight motivation items as quantitative data and journal entries and learners’ comments in semistructured interviews as qualitative data were collected and analyzed. The results of null hypothesis tests on the questionnaires indicate that authentic materials had a significantly more positive effect on freshmen’s self-reported motivation than artificial textbook materials, but not on second-year and fourth-year students’. The study also explores the relationship between enjoyableness and meaningfulness of teaching materials to seek the most effective way of using authentic materials, and discusses the effects of other possible factors such as activities and topics. The conclusion suggests that appropriate use of authentic materials, especially enjoyable ones, can be helpful for university teachers of relatively larger classes of freshmen with mixed proficiency levels to raise their L2 motivation. The challenges of conducting this research and suggestions about future studies are also discussed.
©2013 Walter de Gruyter, Berlin Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Masthead
- Masthead
- Articles
- A Study of the Middle Construction in English with Special Reference to Learner’s Dictionaries
- Authentic or Artificial Materials: The Effects of Material-Types on L2 Motivation
- Foreign Language Anxiety: Past and Future
- A Contrastive Study of the Passive Voice in Journal Articles in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics
- The Effect of Language Proficiency on Focus on Form in Doing Dictogloss Task
- A Study of the Impacts of Participating in the “CCTV CUP” English Public Speaking Contest on the Contestants
- An ERP Study on Metaphor Comprehension in the Bilingual Brain
- Chinese Abstracts
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Masthead
- Masthead
- Articles
- A Study of the Middle Construction in English with Special Reference to Learner’s Dictionaries
- Authentic or Artificial Materials: The Effects of Material-Types on L2 Motivation
- Foreign Language Anxiety: Past and Future
- A Contrastive Study of the Passive Voice in Journal Articles in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics
- The Effect of Language Proficiency on Focus on Form in Doing Dictogloss Task
- A Study of the Impacts of Participating in the “CCTV CUP” English Public Speaking Contest on the Contestants
- An ERP Study on Metaphor Comprehension in the Bilingual Brain
- Chinese Abstracts
