the negative effects resulting from children’s short attention span and tiredness, the two questionnaires were completed in 10 to 15 minutes approximately in two different days within a week. Furthermore, the students in this school are regrouped into new classes in 3rd and 5th grades and are assigned with new homeroom teachers and subject teachers, which may cause students’ uneasiness and worries. To avoid the effect of the negative emotion, the whole data collection was done at the end of November, 2015, which was about three months after the start of a new term, when most of the participants from 3rd and 5th grades managed to get used to the new teachers, classmates, and things in school.
The MALESC and the SIEM questionnaires given to 214 participants in the selected elementary school were all filled out and returned completely by December 2015, making the return ratio and the effective ratio of the two questionnaires 100%.
3.4 Data Analysis
After the administration of the questionnaires, the data were analyzed to answer the research questions. Both of quantitative and qualitative analysis methods and skills were included in this study to serve the research purposes. The quantitative methods were applied to answer the first and third research questions. The data were mainly from the two questionnaires, the MALESC and the SIEM. The qualitative skills were used to analyze the six open-ended questions.
The first research question aimed to examine whether young learners’ EFL learning motivation decreased as their age increased. To find the answers to the assumption that when children grew older, their motivation for EFL learning went
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down, the two sets of continuous scores, age and motivation, collected by the MALESC, were analyzed with ANOVA to see if age had a significant influence on the changes of EFL learning motivation throughout the four grade levels.
Then, to answer the second research question, not only the quantitative results of the MALESC, but also the data obtained by the open-ended question 1 was examined qualitatively for specific underlying EFL learning motive factors among Taiwanese pupils. The given responses were divided into three main categories: the intrinsic motive, the extrinsic motive, and the interests for foreign countries as those in the MALESC (Carreira, 2006). Though open-ended questions 4, 5, and 6 seemed not to directly relate to the research questions of the present study, the answers to the questions may provide not only reasons and explanations for the results of the research questions, but also important information for researchers and teachers for further studies and effective teaching. What’s more, the open-ended questions 2 and 3 were also examined qualitatively because the information may provide the potential factors for the result of the third research question. The researcher used the taxonomy to code all 214 questionnaires. Following the tradition of qualitative studies, the responses were further analyzed according to the recurring themes. Through the frequencies and the themes of the answers mentioned by the participants, the researcher may find out details about the motivating factors that potentially affect children’s EFL and overall learning.
Finally, the third research question aimed to explore if there was a relationship between intrinsic motivation for overall learning and motivation for EFL learning. To reach the goal, the data collected from the SIEM had to be analyzed with ANOVA to
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obtain the intrinsic motivation variable first. After that, the two sets of variables generated from the SIEM and the MALESC were analyzed with Pearson Correlation Coefficient to see the degree of relationship between the two variables because this product-moment correlation coefficient (r), which had a small standard error, was the most widely used bivariate correlational technique in educational research (Gall et al., 1996).
Table 3.7 Data Analysis
Research Questions Instruments Data Analysis
The First Question
MALESC (Questionnaire for EFL learning
motivation)
One-way ANOVA between age and EFL motivation
The Second Question
Open-ended Questions for EFL learning motivation
Recurring themes coded into three categories: Intrinsic between age and intrinsic motivation (SIEM)
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The whole procedure was presented as Fig. 2.
Fig. 2 The Whole Procedure
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ESULTSIn this chapter, the researcher showed the results of both quantitative and qualitative analyses that answered the three research questions. The data collected for the first and third research questions were analyzed with statistical methods, including ANOVA and Pearson Correlation. The qualitative data were coded according to the traditions of qualitative studies by recurring themes and frequencies.
In the first part, the data obtained from the MALESC were measured with ANOVA to check if age had significant influence over the development and changes of the pupils’ EFL learning motivation.
In the second part, the results gathered through the MALESC along with the information collected from open-ended question 1 were analyzed either quantitatively or qualitatively in order to see the underlying factors that motivated EFL learning among Taiwanese students. The rest of the open-ended questions were also examined qualitatively to explore the useful information for the present study, future studies as well as for teachers.
Finally, in the third part, the data obtained from the SIEM were examined with ANOVA first because this result served as one of the two variables for the analysis of the third research question. Then, Pearson Correlation was applied to compute the data collected from the results of the MALESC and the SIEM, measuring to what extent the two kinds of motivation were correlated.
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