The effect technological tools on EFL learners' reading attitudes and motivations

Reading is one of the most crucial academic language skills in the modern digital world of information and technologies. In Turkey, this skill is generally taught in the preparatory classes by teachers who select course books with short-texts aiming general comprehension. However, reading English as a pleasure time activity, which develops students' vocabulary, language efficacy and general knowledge, is not common among students. The course books for reading are for intensive reading in nature. Although Intensive Reading (IR) is proven to be beneficial, the gains students can get from it are less than the ones they can get from Extensive Reading. In IR, students are expected to accomplish tasks about the short reading text inside classroom; however, in ER, reading is a long-term activity which enables students to read whenever they want, like a pleasure time activity. For teachers, it is difficult to evaluate how much vocabulary and grammar reading as a free-time activity teaches to students. Also, it takes a lot of time to prepare quizzes, exams for the books students read. As mentioned above, technology has also become an essential part of language learning. Moodle Reader as a technological tool gets into the process at this point. It enables teachers to make assessments about students after they read graded readers. There are lots of quizzes in it about graded readers which evaluates students' vocabulary and whether they read the books or not. The present study focused on the effects of Moodle Reader as an ER tool to preparatory class students' reading English attitudes and motivations. It also aimed to find out whether gender, language proficiency and the time spent on internet differentiate the possible effects of Moodle Reader to reading English motivation and attitudes of students. A survey was administered randomly to participants as a pre-test before the ER program and as a post-test after it. The data were analyzed quantitatively with the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS), to develop descriptive statistics and, both surveys were analyzed for internal consistency by using Cronbach's alpha. The findings of the pre and post-tests demonstrated that Moodle Reader has a positive effect on students' motivations and attitudes towards reading in English, indicating that it influences the upper level and female students more than the others. Also, the findings proved that students who spend less time on internet are affected by Moodle Reader more than the ones with more time.