New Thought of Motivating Students Interests to Read and Write

English teachers have more struggles with teaching reading and writing courses than their
students do with taking the course. Generally when students are facing a very challenging
situation in writing or reading, their teachers are facing with greater challenges, because teaching
is much harder than learning. From the perspective of an English teacher, motivating students
interests is a very effective way of teaching student. The author, MindShift, as an experienced
English teacher, wrote an article trying to give his opinion about the motivating students
interests in writing and reading, which is based on the knowledge of another textbook: Building
a Community of Self-Motivated Learners: Strategies to Help Students Thrive in School and
Beyond, and the author discusses how to drive students intrinsic motivation of writing and
reading (MS2015):
Before the article, there is an excerpt from the text book mentioned above; listing the
main factors of what might increase students interest on reading and writing, which are:
autonomy, competence, relatedness and interesting and valuable for future goals (MS2015).
Negating the second half of the last opinion, valuable for the future, (MS2015) the article
begins with a research saying that it is damage to intrinsic motivation especially if students have
little confident (MS2015) on the subject studying and researches has shown that the percentage
of students having English as their favorite subject is decreasing: the lack of confidence and
interests will damage students motivation.
After the negation, the author qualifies (MS2015) the first part, clarifying that intrinsic
motivation will only be damaged when the importance of the course is mentioned because the
motivation comes from the instrumental benefits (MS2015) rather than the joy (MS2015);
there will be very few impact on the intrinsic motivation if the students see also the potential
benefits of the subject. The author suggests that as a teacher, when introducing the topics on
influences of the course, he should focus more on the actual benefit, with the presence of
autonomy, competence and relatedness (MS2015). The third part of the article is the
application of the idea discussed above: the author lists his personal experience as an English
teacher on facing the similar situation: he thinks that mentioning the importance of the course
does not seem to have bad influences on his students. As for the so saying damage, it might
just be that the course is originally so boring, that student started to ask why they were doing this
course.
The article is very formal and professional in terms of style and the exigency is based on
the academic situation: when students having trouble with learning writing and reading, the
teachers also have some problems teaching it. The purpose of this article is to inform and discuss
the idea of driving out students intrinsic motivation on reading and writing (MS2015), the
audiences are the English teachers who were familiar with the book Building a Community of
Self-Motivated Learners: Strategies to Help Students Thrive in School and Beyond (MS2015),
written by Larry Ferlazzo, since lots of discussion was based on the ideas of the book. The

author wrote the article because many students have struggle with reading and writing, and
there are more English teachers, including the author, who are trying to find out ways for
students to fight with this struggle: one of the most efficient ways of doing so is to motivate the
students, letting them having interests to study themselves. Since the audiences are
professional with the field and the purpose is served on a serious discussion and due to the
formal rhetorical situation of the article, there are no entertaining designs in the article itself.
There is only a picture of a kid reading on the chair, showing what the article is going to be
about with the title; persona of the article is straightforward, plate and even boring to a great
extent, no pathos involved in the article. Since the idea of the article is to disprove a traditional
thought of English teaching about mentioning the impact of learning; also the author reflects
on his own experience: therefore there is ethos of the English teaching community in the
article. There are a lot of logos in the article because of the great amount of the quotations used
in the article.
Throughout the article, the author expressed his own opinion clearly, using the all types
of quotations from other sources, either as evidence or even directly as the idea of article. There
are more than twenty quotations in the whole article, which only has a word count of eleven
hundred words, with an average of one reference per fifty-five words; the actual average might
be lower because the author also included some of his personal experience. Here are some
quotations from the article: Motivation researchers Edward Deci and Richard Ryan call
slightly different versions of it regulation through identification and integrated regulation.
(MS2015). Regulation through identification and integrated regulation precisely
summarized the differences between the idea discussed in the first part and that of the second
part. Not only did the quotations make the article critical and convincing because almost every
word in the article came from a resource, but also make the author sounds serious and formal: the
number of resource represents the effort on research and therefore the knowledge of the author,
which will also make the article more convincing.
The article has a very unique structure in many different perspectives: first of all, this
article is a logic-order based article which means the development of the article is based on the
logic of the discussion. On the other hand, however, the article is divided into three sections and
each section has its own central idea, and the transition is so fluent that I did not realize it until I
saw the two almost opposite ideas were discussed in two parts. Here is the example from the
text: Is this a bad strategy? The slightly qualified answer is yes, no, and possibly
maybe . . . (MS2015) This quotation is the transition between the first and the second section
of the article, which are correspondingly the limitations of telling impacts to the future and
benefits of telling it in a neglected way: when focusing more on the instrumental benefit.
Another reason that the transition was fluent was that the author used it as part of the logic
development, which makes the transition more natural. In the same example, after the reading
the first part, I had the similar question to the one written in the transition: if telling the impact
of the course to the future to the students were bad, why would the author list it at beginning of

the text? In order to make the transition part of the logic, the two parts being transited have to
be somehow logically related; the author put the two almost controversy ideas into one logical
argument, one being the supplement of the other.
Since the transitions are fluent in the article, the entire article is well-connected
structurally, and the ideas are appearing to be more related than they actually are; the author
even connected the final thought with the introduction. In the introduction, the four main
points were excerpted and listed clearly; the author then questioned the second half of the last
main point and started the article. It seemed like the four listed majors ideas are just an
introduction to the article, no actual logical connection with it. However, after finishing
answering the question, the author connected the other three and a half points with the solved
question, saying that all of them were important to generate the motivation of students reading
and writing, using his own experience showing that if the first three were missing, telling
students the instrumental benefits would not work at all since the course was boring.
This article is overall very educational: besides that it does help English teachers with
their teaching skills, it also indirectly shows what students should do in the terms of writing
and reading; therefore the potential audience of the article could also be students who have
struggle with readings and writings. The article itself is well-written and the author uses a lot
of writing skills that can be learned and used in other writing situations: the article is over all
very interesting; even though its tone and design are formal, it has a very great structure which
connects almost all the ideas in the article together, making the article fluent. This type of
writing is very rare on the Internet nowadays yet it is good. Nevertheless, it would have been
better if the design is more interesting. The article also shows the benefit of doing research to
writing: the more the quotations are in the article, the more convincing the article is because it
shows the audiences that the author is not making anything up; things he said has references.

Citation:
MindShift. "What Motivates A Students Interest in Reading and Writing." KQED News, 18 Mar.
2015. Web. 03 Feb. 2016. <http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2015/03/18/what-motivates-studentsinterest-in-reading-and-writing/>.