leila anj

According to Rost (2006) motivation has been called the “neglected heart” of language teaching. As teachers, we often forget that all of our learning activities are filtered through our students’ motivation. In this sense, students control the flow of the classroom. Without student motivation, there is no pulse; there is no life in the class. When we learn to incorporate direct approaches to generating student motivation in our teaching, we will become happier and more successful teachers. The issue of motivation, particularly in EFL settings, is so important that other considerations about teaching methodology seem to pale in comparison. It is important to think about motivation as the essence of language teaching because of the stark realities of learning English for most of our students.

Reading is a language-based skill and involves cognitive process. It is the most important skill to master in order to ensure success in learning. Reading is a process that requires effort on the readers’ parts if they want to understand what they are reading. A considerable amount of research has been devoted to understanding the process that contribute to reading comprehension.Vocabulary knowledge and its role in reading comprehension has been one of the main areas of focus in second language research for the last twenty years. So, the present study tends to investigate the effect of vocabulary knowledge on EFL learners’ reading comprehension performance. Data were collected by questionnaire from 81 Iranian EFL undergraduate students of English.The results of Pearson Correlation analyses showed a significant positive relationship between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension. The findings suggest that giving awareness of vocabulary knowledge to the students along with mak...