Georgian High School Students’ Attitudes towards Classroom Reading

Abstract

Reading is widely accepted as one of the most important second/foreign language skills as it offers language learners the opportunity to acquire a variety of lexical items, grammatical structures, and additional schematic knowledge. It is quite difficult to motivate language learners to read more in the classroom. Many school teachers are unaware of specific ways and strategies to motivate language learners to read. The study aimed to investigate Georgian 10th grade students’ motivation to learn language and their attitudes towards classroom reading. The sample of the study consisted of fifty students. The results of the study indicated that students were more motivated integratively than instrumentally. Classroom reading was less interesting for them because they were less interested in the topics included in their text books. It can be concluded that there is a need for more varied and interesting reading topics to increase students’ motivation towards classroom reading. The goal of the paper is to show to teachers that students, on the one hand, realize the importance of classroom (i.e., intensive) reading, but, on the other hand, are bored with the way it is normally taught. It is teachers’ task to find out the students’ needs and motivation and to take measures to increase the motivation.