VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES


ĐINH THỊ HÀ TRANG
A STUDY ON DEMOTIVATING FACTORS IN READING
LESSONS OF THE 10th FORM STUDENTS AT HIGH
SCHOOL FOR GIFTED STUDENTS, HANOI NATIONAL
UNIVERSITY OF EDUCATION
(Nghiên cứu về những yếu tố gây mất hứng thú trong giờ đọc hiểu
của học sinh lớp 10 tại trường THPT Chuyên
– Đại Học Sư Phạm Hà Nội)

M.A. MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS
Field: English Teaching Methodology
Code: 60140111

Hanoi - 2015

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VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES


ĐINH THỊ HÀ TRANG
A STUDY ON DEMOTIVATING FACTORS IN READING
LESSONS OF THE 10th FORM STUDENTS AT HIGH


I would like to acknowledge my truthful gratitude to my supervisor, Dr. Huynh Anh
Tuan, from Faculty of Post - Graduate Studies, University of Languages and
International Studies, Vietnam National University. Thanks to his thorough reading,
critical comments, invaluable guidance and precious corrections, I was able to find
the right way to complete this study.
I also would like to express my sincere thanks to my colleagues at High School for
Gifted Students, Hanoi National University of Education, who have been willing to
complete my survey questionnaire and have given me invaluable suggestions to the
research.
I appreciate the assistance and cooperation of the students in classes 10 Math 1, 10
Physics and 10 Chemistry at High School for Gifted Students, Hanoi National
University of Education.
My special words of thanks are sent to my family, especially my husband who has
given me encouragement and support throughout my research work.
Hanoi, 2015

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ABSTRACT

Reading has long been considered as a fundamental skill by many second
language learners. Reading itself, however, causes students a lot of difficulties to
acquire. This study was conducted to investigate demotivating factors in English
reading lessons of the 10th form students at High School for Gifted Students, Hanoi
National University of Education. To meet the objectives of the study, two different
groups of participants are taken into investigation, 109 students of three classes
including 10 Math1, 10 Physics and 10 Chemistry and 6 teachers of English. This
study was carried out in the form of survey research. The main instruments

6. Method of the study
7. Design of the study
PART B: DEVELOPMENT
CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW
1.1. Theoretical background of demotivation
1.1.1. Definitions of demotivation
1.1.2. Demotivating factors in foreign language learning
1.2. Theoretical background of reading and reading comprehension
1.2.1. Definitions of reading
1.2.2. Definitions of reading comprehension
1.2.3. The significance of reading comprehension
1.2.4. Demotivating factors in reading comprehension
CHAPTER 2: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
2.1. Research setting
2.2. Subjects
2.3. Research types
2.4. Data collection instruments
2.4.1. Questionnaires
2.4.2. Interviews
2.5. Data collection procedures
2.5.1. Questionnaires
2.5.2. Interviews
2.6. Data analysis method
CHAPTER 3: DATA ANALYSIS
3.1. Students’ responses to the questionnaire and the interview’s
questions
3.2. Teachers’ responses to the questionnaire
3.3. Findings and discussion
3.4. Implications
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PART C: CONCLUSION
1. Recapitulation
2. Summary of the findings
3. Limitations of the study
4. Suggestions for further research
REFERENCES
APPENDIX

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LIST OF CHARTS

Chart 3.1: Students’ attitudes towards the learning of reading English
Chart 3.2: Students’ interest in English reading lessons
Chart 3.3: Students’ opinions on teachers’ classroom activities
Chart 3.4: Teachers’ attitudes towards the importance of teaching reading skills

LIST OF TABLES


viewed to involve reading words in a linear fashion and internalizing their meaning
one at a time. Reading seems to be a source of frustration. Some students complain
that they feel rather bored when they learn reading skills. The reading process
requires a certain amount of time and involves a lot of individual work, which is not
in some way related to the communicative language ability. Unlike speaking or
listening, there is little chance for students to ask for additional explanation or
clarification. Reading lessons are considered to cause the tiredness, even making
students lose their interest in learning other skills or demotivating students in
absorbing the knowledge. However, reading is fundamental in developing the mind
and it is of great importance to improve other language skills.
Consequently, a large number of studies (Dornyei, 1990, 2001a, 2001b;
Gardner, Lalonde, Moorcroft, & Evers, 1985; Oxford & Shearin,1994; Scarcella &
Oxford, 1992; Warden & Lin, 2000, Gorham and Christophel, 1992; Rebecca
Oxford, 1998; Arai , 2004; Falout and Maruyama, 2004; Tsuchiya, 2006; Sakai and
Kikuchi, 2009) have been carried out in the field of motivation and demotivation,
especially both Vietnamese and foreigners have made numerous researches on
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demotivating factors in reading comprehension. These studies have revealed several
findings about factors to demotivate Vietnamese students in learning reading skills
and methods to overcome these demotivating factors. However, there have not been
a large number of studies going into reality to check those findings from the
perception of students.
Despite the great effort from teachers and learners, there are still weaknesses
in the current teaching and learning reading English skills at High School for Gifted
Students, Hanoi National University of Education. Specifically, students’
demotivation can constitute a barrier for an enjoyable teaching and learning.
All these facts, henceforth, have offered the researcher a chance to conduct
“A study on demotivating factors in reading lessons of 10 th form students at High

general.
5. Scope of the study
This study was conducted to find out demotivating factors in reading
comprehension and suggest some recommendations in order to develop students’
motivation for learning English reading skills at High School for Gifted Students,
Hanoi National University of Education.
6. Method of the study
In order to achieve its aim, a survey research design is employed in the study.
The research is carried out on the basis of survey questionnaires and interviews.
Firstly, the data were collected with the use of the survey questionnaires which were
conducted with 6 teachers of English and 109 students in the 10 th form students at
High School for Gifted Students, Hanoi National University of Education. Then,
interviews were employed with ten students randomly selected for further
information.
7. Design of the study
The study is organized as follows:
Part A: INTRODUCTION, presents the rationale, the aims, and the research
questions, the significance of study, the scope of the study, the method of the study
and the design of the study.
Part B: DEVELOPMENT, consists of the following chapters
 Chapter 1, LITERATURE REVIEW, presents the theoretical background
related to demotivation including the conceptions of demotivation,
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demotivating factors in foreign language learning. In addition, this chapter
also covers the followings: the definitions of reading, the definitions of
reading comprehension, the significance of reading comprehension and
potential problems in reading comprehension.
 Chapter 2, METHODOLOGY, provides general information about the

test results related to the curriculum and their commitment to L2 skills after their
study is over.

It could be described as a driving force that energizes human

behavior and directs their behavior.
Demotivation should not be viewed as the opposite of motivation but a
certain aspect of motivation. According to Christophel and Gorham (1995),
demotivation is conceptually different from the phenomenon of no motivation.
There are some positive factors which may motivate students’ learning, but there
are also elements causing them to demotivate at some point which are called
demotivating influences. There are also some influences with a negative effect,
which are called demotivating influences. They reduce students’ motivation during
learning. Dornyei (2001a) made every effort to provide a definition for
demotivation. It concerns “various negative influences that cancel out existing
motivation” (p.142) or “specific external forces that reduce or diminish the
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motivational basis of a behavioral intention or an ongoing action” (p.143).
Therefore, demotivation could be regarded as the dark side of motivation.
Demotivation, as also defined by Dornyei (2001b), is a decrease or drop in level of
motivation. Dornyei points out that demotivation does not mean that a learner has
lost his or her motivation completely. In contrast, the positive influences that
originally made up the motivational basis of behavior can still be there. However,
demotivation is not solely external, and many researchers (e.g., Arai, 2004; Falout
& Maruyama, 2004) included internal factors such as lack of self- confidence and
negative attitude within learners themselves to complement external sources. In
spite of his definition, even Dornyei (2001) himself listed reduced self- confidence
and a negative attitude toward the foreign language as sources of demotivation.

external demotivating factors which reduce or diminish the motivation to study
English.
1.1.2. Demotivating factors in foreign language learning
There have been several studies on demotivating factors mainly in the field
of instructional communication, for example, in lectures of communication at
North American universities (Gorham & Christophel, 1992; Christophel & Gorham,
1995; Gorham & Millette, 1997) and demotivators in university lectures in China,
Germany, Japan and the United States (Zhang, 2007). In the field of language
teaching, Chambers, Rudnai, Ushioda and Dornyei were the pioneers to study
demotivation of learners of English. In recent years, this issue has attracted many
more researchers, especially those from Japanese context (Ikeno, 2002; Arai, 2004;
Falout & Maruyama, 2004; Hasegawa, 2004; Sakai & Kikuchi, 2009; Falout er al,
2009) and Vietnam (Tran & Richard Baldauf, 2007). The ultimate goal of
identifying demotivating factors is to more easily determine the learners’ motivation
and the way to boost their incentives of learning. That is also the reason why there
have been a lot of studies revolving around this topic.
A demotivation study was initiated in the United States with Gorham and
Christophel (1992) attempting to identify what factors causing demotivation among
college students taking introductory communication classes. In comparing learner
attributions of demotivation and motivation, they found that the absence of
demotivators in the classroom such as unenthusiastic teaching, dissatisfaction with
grading, and boring subject had a more positive influence on motivation that the
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presence of motivators such as an enthusiastic and inspiring teacher. The
researchers gave a conclusion that teachers could promote learner motivation
simply by preventing demotivation. Demotivators were collected from students’
responses to the open- ended question: “What things decrease your motivation to try
hard to do your best in that class?” The research findings revealed three main

language, 5) Compulsory nature of second language study, 6) Interference of
another foreign language being studied, 7) Negative attitude towards second
language community, 8) Attitude of group members, and 9) Course book used in
class. It was reported that demotivating factors of the teacher and reduced selfconfidence account for more than half of all demotivating factors.
Arai (2004) conducted a study among 33 university students of high English
proficiency to determine whether they had had demotivating experiences in foreign
language classrooms and to depict the experiences and their instant reactions to
those experiences. Arai collected 105 comments and categorized them into the
following four areas: 1) Teachers, 2) Classes, 3) Class atmosphere, and 4) Others.
She found that the number of reports about the first category, Teachers, accounted
for 46.7% of total reports, followed by Classes (36.2%). The third category, Class
atmosphere, was the least reported (13.3%).
In another study by Falout and Maruyama (2004), the relationship between
demotivation and students’ level of language proficiency was examined. The
researchers employed the 49- item questionnaire developed based on Dornyei’s nine
demotivating factors among 164 freshmen university students from two science
departments. Accordingly, six categories of demotivating factors were identified:
1) Teachers, 2) Courses, 3) Attitude towards English speaking community, 4)
Attitude towards English itself, 5) Self- confidence, and 6) Attitude of group
members. It was found that for the low- proficiency learners, self- confidence,
attitudes towards the second language, courses, teachers, and attitudes of group
members were the most demotivating factors. For the high- proficiency learners,
self- confidence was the most important demotivating factors. In fact, low proficient
students tented to correlate demotivation to their affective states, while the high
proficient students were more suitable to attribute their demotivation to external
factors and indicate more control over their affective states and learning conditions.
Tsuchiya (2006) was able to list nine areas of demotivation after the study
among 129 freshmen: 1) Teachers, 2) Classes, 3) Compulsory nature of English
study, 4) Negative attitude toward the English- speaking community, 5) Negative
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demotivating experiences and present proficiencies. Demotivating factors were
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grouped into three categories: 1) External conditions of the learning environment
2) Internal conditions of the learner 3) Reactive behaviors to demotivating
experiences. Internal and reactive factors were shown to correlate with long- term
EFL learning outcomes. Findings indicated that beginning, less- proficient learners
among non- English majors were least likely to control their affective states to cope
with demotivating experiences.
To cut a long story short, numerous studies have been carried out on the
issue of demotivation. However, the findings are applied in specific teaching and
learning contexts. Two groups of demotivating factors including internal
attributions and external attributions, which were extracted in the study by Tran and
Baldauf Jr. (2007), give the researcher a lot of guidance in examining the common
negative factors affecting high school students’ English learning in reading
comprehension at High School for Gifted Students, Hanoi National University of
Education.
1.2. Theoretical background of reading and reading comprehension
1.2.1. Definitions of reading
Reading was traditionally regarded as a passive process that involves reading
words in a linear fashion and internalizing their meaning one at a time. However,
Goodman (1971:153) sees reading as “a psycholinguistic process by which the
reader, a language user, reconstructs, as best as he can, a message which has been
encoded by a writer as graphic display”. After the emergence of the
psycholinguistic model of reading, Goodman, (1976) and Smith (1971; 1973) argue
that reading is actually an active process, in which readers create meaning from the
printed words or receive and interpret a message from printed materials. In other
words, reading is a process of how information is processed from the text into
meanings, starting with the information from the text, and ending with what the

he can read accurately and efficiently, so as to get the maximum information of a
text with the minimum of understanding”.
Grellet (1981:3) defined reading comprehensions as “understanding a written
text means extracting the required information from it as efficiently as possible”.
Gillet and Temple (1998:2) said that comprehension is the understanding
new information in light of what we have already known.
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Ngadiso (1998:1) indicated that reading comprehension is the process of
using syntactic, semantic, and rhetorical information found in the printed texts to
reconstruct in the reader’s mind, using the knowledge of the world he or she
possesses.
John R. Kirby (2006) showed that reading comprehension is the application
of a skill that evolved for other purposes (listening or oral comprehension) to a new
form of input (text). Unlike oral comprehension, reading comprehension is not
something for which the brains have evolved. Whereas oral comprehension seems
to develop naturally with minimal deliberate intervention, reading comprehension is
more challenging and requires deliberate instruction. Humans have been doing oral
comprehension for 100,000 years or more (Donald, 1991). Reading comprehension
has only been practiced for 5,000 years (Olson, 1994)
John R. Kirby (2006) also indicated that there are three different types or
levels of comprehension. Any type of comprehension a reader employs will depend
on ability, purpose and instruction.
 Passive comprehension: What we do when we are following a text but not
analyzing or assessing it deeply.
 Comprehension for learning: What we do when we try to remember the
details and/ or deeper meanings of a text.
 Self- regulated comprehension: What we do when we are using the text to
achieve our own goals.

country.
 Reading is a good way to find out about new ideas, facts and
experiences.
1.2.4. Potential problems in reading comprehension
Reading comprehension is commonly known to be complex and
multifaceted. It is no surprise that several students encounter reading
comprehension difficulties. To illustrate this, students have difficulty in
understanding word meanings, understanding important ideas, making inferences
with the mentioned information; even they do not understand what they have read at
all. As a result, they frequently avoid reading and feel frustrated with reading tasks
in school. According to Nation et al. (2004), poor comprehenders often have
weaknesses in some aspects of language skills with deficits at both lower (e.g.,
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vocabulary knowledge) and higher levels (e.g., inference generation, understanding
figurative language). There is no doubt that motivation plays a critical role in
students’ foreign language learning outcomes, especially in reading comprehension.
According to Saville - Troike (2006: 85- 86), individual motivation is a factor that
is used to explain why some second language learners are more successful than
others. However there are demotivating factors which negatively influence the
learner’s attitudes and behaviors and lead to undesired learning outcomes. The
findings of the study “Impact of demotivating factors on the reading
comprehension achievement of Iranian EFL learners” by Ghaedrahmat & Entezari
& Abedi (2014) reveal that demotivation negatively affects students’ performance
in reading comprehension test. The less the amount of demotivation is, the higher
the reading scores. In particular, negative teachers’ traits and behaviors, improper
methods of teaching English in class, lack of focusing on oral skills, teaching mere
grammar at high schools, limitation of English to textbooks, improper evaluation
system and lack of using technology in English classes were the most contextual

2.2. Subjects
The participants are grouped into two categories in this study.
The first group is 109 tenth form students from three classes of Mathematics,
Physics and Chemistry at High School for Gifted Students.
Total
10 Math 1
10 Physics
10 Chemistry
109
35
38
36
Table 2. 1: Information on the Number of Students Surveyed
They have been learning English for at least 4 years. The teachers claim that all
the participants were provided with reading strategies when they were at secondary
school. All of the participants, however, come from different parts of our country.

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Different educational settings may apply specific standards of teaching, which
result in the difference in levels of knowledge. In other words, it causes the
imbalance between the scope of vocabulary and the learners’ levels. As a result, the
proficiency level of English among students is not the same. Students with higher
proficiency level of English do not show their interest in absorbing the knowledge
that is not new and challenging. In contrast, ones with lower proficiency level of
English are fed up with following English lessons which cause a lot of difficulties.
These students even catch up with nothing in lessons. It is generally believed that
this imbalance itself leads to students’ low motivation in learning English,
especially in English reading comprehension. The scores of reading skills are very