Abstract
This study investigated the relationship between intrinsic/extrinsic motivation and L2 (English) speaking skill between male and female high school students in Iranian EFL context. To this end, 249 male and female students’ intrinsic and extrinsic motivation was measured with a questionnaire and their English speaking skill was assessed by a speaking rating scale. To triangulate the data, semi-structured interviews with a sample of 25 EFL students were conducted. The results of descriptive statistics and correlation coefficients demonstrated that the females had a higher level of intrinsic motivation while the males had a higher level of extrinsic motivation. Besides, the degree of correlation between intrinsic motivation and attainment of L2 speaking skill was statistically higher among the females. Also, t-test results indicated a statistically significant difference in the intrinsic/extrinsic type of motivation between the male and female students. The findings highlight the role of gender in dealing with motivation in L2 classes.
Highlights
Interview data were collected from a sample of 25 EFL participants to provide further insight into the quantitative results and explain some factors in relation to the EFL students’ speaking skill and their extrinsic/intrinsic motivation
When asked to explain why they thought speaking English was important and in what ways they thought speaking good English could affect their lives, Mohsen, a high school male who was satisfied with his speaking ability, said, “If I become an engineer in a factory, for example, I am expected to deal with catalogs, which are mostly in English”
The present study investigated the relationships between intrinsic/extrinsic motivation in each gender group and the attainment of L2 speaking skill among a sample of Iranian EFL learners
Summary
Affective variables are regarded as one of the most important individual variables (Brown, 2014). One of these affective variables is motivation, which refers to the desire to initiate L2 learning and the effort employed to sustain it (Ortega, 2009). Motivation for L2 learning is a multifaceted construct, the two dimensions of which are intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is defined as “the inherent tendency to seek out novelty and challenges, to extend and exercise one’s capacities, to explore, and to learn” The term extrinsic motivation “involves doing an activity to attain a separable consequence, whether tangible or otherwise”
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