The effects of anticipation rewards on students’ motivation in learning grammar

Abstract

Teaching grammar , as teaching other modules in English , has become a difficult work since many teachers of English complain about motivating their students in the class. It has been noticed that most students are not motivated to learn because the y consider the grammar class as uninteresting it fails to attract their attention . Thus, the question rises here as to what extent the teacher is able to lower students‟ anxiety in grammar classes and to increase students‟ motivation in return. In order to answer the question above , we have assumed that lack of motivation is due to the lack of rewards in the class. For this reason, the reward system was introduced in grammar teaching to see to what extent the learning process can be more effective, and thus students‟ outcomes can be better. This research work aims at explaining how motivation can be increased through the anticipation of rewards in grammar classes. It studies the effects of r ewards on learners‟ results in Second Year G rammar c lasses at Mentouri University, Constantine. In this research, 123 stud ents participate d in the main study ; they have been randomly chosen to take part in the experiment. One group was designed as the Control G roup and the two other gro ups as two e xperi mental groups. Students in the Control G roup have been taught within the u sual grammar instruction , while students in the two experimental groups have been subject to the new reward strategy introduced by the researcher. The fact that we have selected two experimental groups aims at validating the assumed results of the experime nt. The researcher has observed the behaviour of the participants in the three groups during the training period, and after the administration of the post - test, a com parison of the pre - test results and the post - test results was made in the three groups. In fact, the participants in the two experimental groups were noticeably different from those in the Control G roup. In other words, they have become more enthusiastic, more active , and they participate more in the class. However, in the Control G roup, students showed no special development in their behaviour. In addition to this , the improvement means in the three groups showed that the marks of the students in the two experimental groups in the post test are much better than those obtained in the pre - test. However, in the control group; the development of the students‟ marks in the post - test was so tiny and of a little importance. The analysis of the results and the interpretation of the researcher‟s observations show ed how rewards can be very eff ective in raising students‟ motivation in grammar classes and in increasing their potential to learn new grammatical items.