This research inquires into whether the motivation of students learning English for Academic Purposes (EAP) at the upper-intermediate level improves when thematic instruction is employed in the classroom.
This is the first time that a theme-based integrated skills approach was implemented at the Department of Basic English (DBE), METU at the intermediate and upper-intermediate levels. With the outcome of the needs analysis carried out by the administration, it was realized that students at the preparatory school needed to use integrated skills as reflected in &lsquo / real life&rsquo / . Moreover, thematic instruction was seen to be a requisite in the new curriculum since content is a key motivating principle. Hence, since one of the main concerns was the motivation of students attending courses at the preparatory school, there was a need to examine whether using this mode of instruction at the upper-intermediate level was able to ameliorate student motivation.
For this research, firstly a pilot study and then qualitative analysis using in-depth interviews developed on the basis of the pilot study was employed. Therefore, using a triangulation of different kinds of data on related questions, interviews were carried out with 14 students on three separate occasions at the end of each span from the upper-intermediate group, two administrators and six upper-intermediate instructors.
From the point of view of the students it appeared that generally content encouraged learning and improved English proficiency if the themes/topics were found to be of interest. However, the degree of impact of the themes and topics on student motivation largely depended on whether the student was intrinsically motivated or not. If the student was intrinsically motivated, content had a nominal affect on motivating them.
The study showed that if the themes are linear and have a parochial focus on topics, too much time is spent on a theme, a redundancy of lexical items are taught, unnecessary details are included, and difficult and academic language used, these led to student demotivation in respect of content. Thus, indicating a greater variety of content was needed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:METU/oai:etd.lib.metu.edu.tr:http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12605064/index.pdf |
| Date | 01 June 2004 |
| Creators | Olgun, Alison Alev |
| Contributors | Yeminici, Alev |
| Publisher | METU |
| Source Sets | Middle East Technical Univ. |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | M.A. Thesis |
| Format | text/pdf |
| Rights | To liberate the content for public access |
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