The negative effects of external rewards on young language students’ performance, withdrawing, and psychological factors: An experimental study

Abstract

Investigating the factors influencing the acquisition of a L2 among young learners is a valuable area for researchers and practitioners. In schools, external rewards are commonly employed by language teachers to enhance primary school students’ performance on language tasks and increase their motivation. However, the impact of this practice on this age group remains largely unexplored, with no experimental studies conducted to date. Therefore, this study represents the first to delve into the influence of the extrinsic reward system while engaging students in a language activity. Specifically, we investigated whether introducing an extrinsic reward in the first language task and removing it in the second impacts young students’ performance, withdraw from doing the activity, and psychological factors including intrinsic and external motivation, anxiety, perceived difficulty, and frustration. Our results showed that primary school students (grade 6) performed poorly in the second round once the reward was removed. Moreover, 14 % of the students, among them those who won the first round, withdrew from participating in the second round. Furthermore, losers exhibited lower levels of intrinsic motivation but a higher sense of difficulty, frustration, and external motivation, indicating that losing a reward can negatively affect students’ language performance and psychological factors. Also, we found that our experimental results are consistent among the two genders. We conclude the paper with important implications for the use of the extrinsic reward system for language teaching purposes.