Motivational strategies in undergraduate EAP courses: student perceptions and suggestions

ABSTRACT

Considerable research on university undergraduates’ struggles to master English for academic purposes (EAP) has been undertaken, yet little attention has been paid to the motivational needs of this specific learner group, or the fulfilment of such needs in university EAP courses. This study examines motivational strategies used by teachers of undergraduate EAP classes, student-perceived ineffective characteristics of the strategies, and students’ suggestions for better strategy implementation, together with the relationships between the strategies and the ineffective characteristics/suggestions. Reflective journals were collected from 69 first-year undergraduates who were enrolled in EAP courses offered by a Hong Kong university. The major findings are: 1) The adopted motivational strategies correspond closely to those endorsed in an influential framework; 2) the student participants reported ineffective characteristics pertinent to difficulty, relevance, expected learning outcomes, fairness, and interest; 3) the main suggestions were increased strategy use and provision of more assistance, encouragement, and examples; and 4) most of the suggestions appear to be non-strategy-specific, so they can supposedly be applied to a wide range of motivational strategies. The findings confirm the overall effectiveness of motivational strategies in undergraduate EAP courses, as well as informing university EAP teachers of possible ways to further improve their motivational techniques.

KEYWORDS:

• Motivation
• motivational strategies
• EAP
• undergraduates
• Hong Kong

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Faculty of Humanities of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University [grant number 1.75.xx.8ACH].

Notes on contributors

Tim S. O. Lee

Tim S. O. Lee, PhD, is an instructor at the English Language Centre of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His research interests are vocabulary teaching and learning, teachers’ motivational behaviour, teacher motivation, and material development.