Sandra Cid Guerrero

Sandra is a PhD student supervised by Marta Kopinska and David Lasagabaster at the University of the Basque Country. She obtained her bachelor’s degree in Primary education (special mention in English as a foreign language) from the University of Deusto (Bilbao) in 2017. She also holds a master’s degree in Language Acquisition in Multilingual Settings from the University of the Basque Country (2022). Sandra has always loved languages and therefore, she decided that part of her teaching training had to be abroad (Norway and Ireland), in which she had worked as a Spanish language assistant. After completing her training, Sandra has worked as a language teacher of Spanish, English and Basque.

In her master’s thesis, the relationship between motivation and L2 reading performance was explored, along with the effects of learners’ motivation type, gender, language proficiency, age, and reading habits. Based on a mixed methods design, twenty participants completed three questionnaires (MRP, MRQ and a questionnaire to learn about their context). Two main results were obtained: first, the level of proficiency had an impact on motivation and the higher the level, the higher the participant’s motivation to read and, second, all participants showed more extrinsic than intrinsic motivation. Strikingly, very few participants viewed reading in English as a self-rewarding or satisfying task. These results revealed that the lack of instructional time devoted to reading in foreign languages led participants to show very little enjoyment of reading in English.

Now, in her PhD, Sandra intends to take this initial study to a larger scale, with participants within the compulsory education system who are in the process of learning their L2/L3 (in this case English). Therefore, this project aims to analyse the type of reading motivation of the students, their L2/L3 proficiency and their reading habits, and thus, compare two different contexts to see the impact of reading motivation on reading achievement in the L2/L3. In this way, their learning process in that language will also be tested. Moreover, a longitudinal study will be conducted to analyse the learning progress and motivation of students in two types of centres (from 4 different schools) over time.