Self-assessment of Motivation: Explicit and Implicit Indicators in L2 Vocabulary Learning

Self-assessment motivation questionnaires have been used in classrooms yet many researchers find only a weak correlation between answers to these questions and learning. In this paper we postulate that more direct questions may measure motivation better, and they may also be better correlated with learning. In an eight week study with ESL students learning vocabulary in the REAP reading tutor, we administered two types of selfassessment questions and recorded indirect measures of motivation to see which factors correlated well with learning. Our results showed that some user actions, such as dictionary look up frequency and number of times a word is listened to, correlate well with self-assesment motivation questions as well as with how well a student performs on the task. We also found that using more direct selfassesment questions, as opposed to general ones, was more effective in predicting how well a student is learning.