Dr. Hooman Bizhani, Shamsoddin Aref & Samira Sobh Gol
Zanjan Branch, Islamic Azad University, Iran
A whole host of studies in the area of English as a foreign language (EFL) have focused on learners’ motivation and spiritual intelligence (SI). However, to date, few attempts have been made to include both motivation and SI in a single study to examine their effect on students’ reading skills. To fill this gap, this study investigated the effect of motivation and SI on Iranian pre-university female students’ reading achievement. An English language proficiency test was used to ensure the homogeneity of the participants (n=67). Pre-tests of motivation and SI were employed and based on the results of these measures the participants were put into 6 sub-groups as: LOW (n = 11), MID (n = 21), and HIGH (n = 35) SI groups and LOW (n = 19), MID (n = 25), HIGH (n = 23) motivation groups. After the treatment, students were given post-tests of motivation and SI as well as a test of reading achievement. A series of One-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests and Shapiro-Wilk tests, Paired Samples t-test, One-Way ANOVA, Post-Hoc Scheffe, and Pearson Product-Moment Correlation tests were administered to analyze the data. The results indicated that LOW, MID, and HIGH groups performed differently in their reading achievement test which means the level of both motivation and SI had a significant influence on their reading skills. It was also concluded that the three main variable of this study were highly correlated.
The above abstract is a part of the article which was accepted at The Third International Conference on Current Issues of Languages, Dialects and Linguistics (WWW.TLLL.IR), 31 January-1February 2019 , Ahwaz.
