Research Benefits Definition of Terms

8 4. Motivation “Motivation is the direction and intensity of an individual’s behaviour in situations in which performance can be evaluated according to some standards; the standards may be personal or may be imposed as external factors” Stipek, 1993: 9 . It is apparent that individual’s performance in particular tasks is affected by both personal factor, which is called intrinsic motivation, and external factor, which is called extrinsic motivation. These factors affect students’ performance significantly and, therefore, the researcher attempts to investigate the influence of intrinsic motivation on students’ performance in Extensive Reading II classroom. 5. Learning styles “Style is related to both personality and cognition” Brown, 2001: 210. Personality refers to extroversion, self esteem, anxiety, and so forth. On the other hand, cognition implies left or right brain orientation, ambiguity tolerance, field sensitivity, and the like. These characterize the consistent and continuing traits, tendencies, or preference that could distinguish a learner from the others. One could, for example, tend to be extroverted or right brain oriented whereas someone else could be introverted and left brain oriented. In this study, the researcher intends to pay attention to personality and cognition aspects based on the quoted Brown’s assertion. Firstly, the researcher focuses the investigation on students’ motivation, figures out their learning styles through multiple data sources, and afterwards correlates the relationship among those factors and their classroom performance. 9

CHAPTER II REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

This chapter includes two sections, namely theoretical description and theoretical framework. The first section, which is theoretical description, will take account of the beneficial related theories to be used in the research, whereas the second section, which is theoretical framework, will depict the correlation between the referred to theories and their roles in the development of the research.

A. Theoretical Description

Carrel and Grabe 1993, as cited in Schmitt 2002: 233, pointed out that interest in second language research and practice, especially in reading skill, has increased dramatically in the past 15 years. Part of this interest is due to the increasing recognition that reading ability is critical for academic learning. This interest is also due to the recognition that reading either second language or foreign language reading represents the primary way that students can learn on their own beyond the classroom activities. Reading, for either second language or foreign language readers, is complex and the development of fluent reading abilities by these readers is a challenging action. However, it is necessary to understand the notion of learning principle. Learning is a process in which learners are engaged in particular tasks in order to accomplish specific objectives; that is, not only to succeed in executing the objectives but also to obtain new meaningful knowledge which afterwards could 10 be applied to another learning experience Fontana, 1985: 37. Obviously, teacher is not the only one factor who decides that the learning process is important. In other words, the learners are able to gain new meaningful knowledge from the on- going learning process, for each learner. Teachers evidently cannot fully control the class and expect every student to succeed in completing the assigned course objectives. At some points, it is recognizable that some learners could succeed in carrying out the course objectives, some others could succeed although they encounter numerous hindrances during accomplishing the assigned tasks, and the rest could fail in carrying out the delegated objectives. Nevertheless, teachers can actually ‘control’ a class to promote and sustain a better learning process by running a well- organized and effective classroom arrangement. The question would be ‘how is it possible for teacher to actually control a classroom?’ First of all, teachers should realize the nature of classroom learning. A classroom is a place in which each individual learner is given opportunities to practise and implement their current proficiency for the sake of the learner’s evaluation and advancement Fontana, 1985: 63. Apart from these opportunities, learning process can still take place outside the class yet learning process can be much better if learners are supervised by classroom teachers. One thing that should be paid attention to is that teachers only fulfill the role as facilitator of learning process. In other words, instead of spoon-feeding the learners, teachers are expected to give more drills which are more meaningful and applicable to the learners’ real life experience. Therefore, teachers are required to arrange a well- 11 organized and effective classroom management in order to provide equal opportunities for each individual learner to develop the learner’s abilities and accordingly advance to higher level of proficiency. Alderson 2000: 32 stated that it has become common practice to divide research into factors that affect reading into the two major clusters of variables that are typically investigated. These factors are particularly focusing on, first, the factors inside the reader and, second, significant aspects outside the reader. There are a lot more constituents that can be investigated from inside the individual reader. The constituents that are originally developed from each individual are generally called reader’s variables. The readers’ variables constitute a number of different variables for instance reader’s prior knowledge or schemata, motivation, strategies in reading, emotional stability, learning styles, and so forth. These variables obviously affect individual’s classroom behaviours and attainment. Referring to the factors inside the readers, this research focuses its attention on two minor variables namely intrinsic motivation and learning styles.

1. Extensive Reading

“Extensive reading is carried out to achieve a general understanding of a usually somewhat longer text” Brown, 2001: 313. In other words, extensive reading means reading many articles, books, longer texts or passages without a focus on classroom exercises that may assess comprehension skills. There are several reading comprehension test activities namely short-answering question related to the text, generating a conclusion or personal opinion about the text,