United Arab Emirates (UAE) high school students’ motivation to read in English as a foreign language

Although there are several research studies that intended to discover what comprises motivation to learn a foreign/second language, to our knowledge there have been no empirical studies in the field of EFL that examined United Arab Emirates (UAE) students’ motivation to read. Therefore, this study intended to investigate how four motivational constructs are related to UAE foreign language reading motivation and English achievement scores. Additionally, this study explored differences in motivational constructs based on gender variable. The data were collected from 513 high school students. The results of this study revealed that Intrinsic Value was the best predictor of UAE high school students’ motivation to reading English as a foreign language. The variables Intrinsic Value and Extrinsic Value were the significant predictors of reading English achievement scores. The results of the MANOVA indicated a significant difference in Extrinsic Value based on gender, with females scoring significantly higher on those items.