EFL LEARNERS’ MOTIVATION IN LEARNING ENGLISH: DOES IT MATTER IN READING?

Abstract

Motivation and achievement are two debatable factors in educational context since those two play prominent roles in supporting students achieving their objectives in learning, and so it is in learning language especially in learning reading comprehension. This phenomenon happened by some students in SMP 10 Bandar Lampung. Some of them understood what they read and some of them did not while they had enough curiosity and motivation in learning English. Thus, the objective of this research was to find out whether or not there was a correlation between students’ motivation in learning English and their achievement in reading comprehension at the second semester of the eighth grade of SMP 10 Bandar Lampung in the academic year 2022/2023. This research employed correlational research design involving 62 students as the sample. The data were collected by using motivation in learning English questionnaire and reading comprehension test. There were 50 questions for motivation in learning English questionnaire and 50 validated items for reading comprehension test. After obtaining the data of both variables, they were analyzed to test the hypothesis by computing Pearson Product Moment correlation formula by using SPSS version 25. The result of hypothesis test demonstrated that Sig. = 0.009 < ɑ = 0.05. Thus, H1 was accepted which meant that there was a correlation between students’ motivation in learning English and their reading comprehension achievement. Further, it was obtained that the result of coefficient correlation was 0.169 which yielded that the correlation of the two variables was very low and positive. Therefore, it was barely able to predict that students who had high motivation in learning English also had a high achievement in reading comprehension