An exploration of participative motivations in a community-based online English extensive reading contest with respect to gender difference

The purpose of this study is to describe an online community-based English extensive reading contest to investigate whether the participants’ intrinsic, extrinsic, and interpersonal motivations and learning results show significant gender differences. A total of 501 valid questionnaires (285 females and 216 males) from Taiwanese high school students and 15 interviewees from the students receiving awards were the subjects in this study. The findings show that females had a stronger participative intrinsic motivation, while males displayed a higher participative interpersonal motivation. Furthermore, female average scores were higher than the male ones on the comprehension tests. Even though the final results of the total scores for females were still higher than those of males, male scores for the interactivity tests were on average higher than those of females. The phenomena and implications behind the participative motivations are specifically discussed and explained.