A Comparative Study on Motivation and English Achievement Among Students in Alternative School and Public High School

The purpose of the present study is to investigate differences in motivation patterns between students in public high school and alternative school. It also aims to identify any differences in the level of motivation according to different levels of English achievement. To this end, the following two research questions have been set. 1. Are there any differences in the level of motivation subtypes between students in public school and alternative school? 2. Are there any differences in the level of motivation according to different levels of English achievement? The participants of this study were 190 students in D public school located in Seoul, and 119 students in H alternative school located in Pohang. A survey on motivation based on the self-determination theory (SDT) was administered along with a cloze test for measuring English achievement level. The cloze test constituted of sentences with ten blanks to fill in with appropriate words such as verb, noun, or prepositions, to complete the sentence. The survey was developed by drawing on Noels et al. (2000), Tanaka (2013), and Ji (2011), and it measures motivational orientations for learning English. It is composed of 5 subscales with 4 items each to measure the level of: amotivation, external regulation, introjected regulation, identified regulation, and intrinsic motivation. A two-way analysis of variance was conducted to examine differences of motivation patterns in the two types of schools across different levels of English achievement. The main findings were as follows. First, it was shown that the level of motivation do not differ significantly across different types of schools. There was a statistically significant difference only for external regulation (F = 5.504, p =.020). Therefore, it can be concluded that except for external regulation, the different educational settings of the two schools do not have a significant effect on motivation. Second, it was shown that the level of motivation differed significantly with different levels of achievement. There were statistically significant differences for three different subtypes of motivation: amotivation (F = 5.529, p =.004), identified regulation (F = 3.439, p=.033), and intrinsic motivation (F = 4.508, p =.012). It showed that students with higherachievement had lower level of amotivation and higher levels of identified regulation and intrinsic motivation. Third, the level of motivation subtypes from highest to lowest was in the same order for both public high school and alternative school. The highest level of motivation for both schools were identified regulation (public M = 3.83; alternative M = 3.96), then intrinsic motivation (public M = 3.10; alternative M = 3.26), introjected regulation (public M = 2.86; alternative M = 2.97), external regulation (public M = 2.85; alternative M = 2.66), and finally amotivation (public M = 2.61; alternative M = 2.34). The pedagogical implication of the results is that there is a need for employing means to increase higher self-determined motivation in both public high school students and alternative school students. For this, modifications in classroom environment and teaching methodology should be further considered.