Abstract
The goal of the present research is to evaluate the relative quality of didactic materials by investigating the impact of different picture story tasks on the students’ motivation in writing narrative essays. We perform a comparative linguistic analysis of three subcorpora of narrative essays corresponding to three different picture story tasks. The study is based on a longitudinal learner corpus containing 197 narrative essays of students from South Tyrolean middle schools written in Italian. In each of the three middle school years, a new picture story task was offered. The tasks were intentionally designed to stimulate students to write more, no restriction on the text length was imposed and no academic evaluation was envisioned, offering the students the possibility to write as much as they wanted. Following Yanguas (2007), who proved that text length highly correlates with motivation, we evaluate motivation by measuring the effect of the task on the text length in tokens, while accounting for the individual competence of the writer in a mixed-effects model. Our results show that there are clear task-related differences in the text length and thus in student’s motivation, the most successful task being the one formulated in the most open manner. This goes along with the self-determination theory (Ryan, Deci, 2000) suggesting that autonomy augments motivation, and also supports the findings of Bomin and Haedong (2016).
BOMIN, K., HAEDONG, K., Korean College EFL Learners’ Task Motivation in Written Language Production, International Education Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2, 2016, 42-50
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YANGUAS, I., A Look at Second Language Learners’ Task Motivation, ASJU, XLI-2, 2007, 333-345