Motivation towards reading among engineering students of Universiti Teknologi Malaysia

Abstract

This study was conducted to find out the English reading habits among engineering students in terms of how often, how much and what the students usually read between academic and non-academic materials. Besides that, their motivation towards English language reading was also been investigate in this study. The instruments used for this study were questionnaire and interviews. Fifty respondents were randomly selected from Faculty of computing who are pursuing a Bachelor of Software Engineering for the quantitative data collection. Six of the respondents were chosen for the interview sessions. The result of this study has revealed that the respondents frequently read course materials and online leisure materials. Majority of the respondents spends between one to two hours in a day to read academic materials in English language. Moreover, majority of the respondents spend less than one hour and between one to two hours in a day to read non-academic materials in English language. Apart from that, the respondents are extrinsically motivated to read academic materials in English language and they are not intrinsically motivated to read both academic and non-academic materials in English language. The findings of this study would provide useful information for the language teachers, lecturers and university administrators in planning programme to cultivate students reading habits and to motivate students to read in English language in the future.