Reading is an activity which has some advantages for readers. Nowadays, students tend to consider that reading a book is a boring activity, especially when they have to read books in English. Therefore, they need a motivation to encourage them to read in English. This study was aimed 1) to describe the reading motivation of high and low achievings students of grade 10th of SMKN 2 Surakarta in the EFL context, and 2) to identify which one is more dominant (intrinsic or extrinsic) motivation for both high and low achieving students of grade 10th of SMKN 2 Surakarta in reading English text.
The study was designed as a descriptive research. The techniques of collecting data in this study were questionnaire and interview. The data from questionnaire were analyzed to find the frequency and percentage in each indicator, while the interview results were interpreted and grouped based on the construct of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.
The quantitative results showed that high achieving students’ reading motivation in English was higher than low achieving students. The reading motivation percentage of high achieving students was 67,50%, while the percentage of low achieving students was 60,43%. On the other hand, qualitative results showed that extrinsic motivation was more dominant for both high and low achieving students in reading English text. Grade, Compliance, and Competition were the strongest indicators for the students to read English text.
This study implies that teachers need to have skills or strategies to increase reading motivation in low achieving students and encourage all students to be intrinsically motivated to read in English.

Keywords: reading motivation, intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, high achieving, low achieving, EFL students.