Due to a variety of reasons, reading has always been a significant problem for the majority of Moroccan high school pupils. This skill reflects the various interactions and operations that the reader’s eyes and brain engage in in order to understand what they read. Teachers continue to place more emphasis on teaching vocabulary, idioms, syntax, and sentence structure than on helping pupils develop their reading comprehension. Due to the traditional reading teaching, it is difficult for teachers to cultivate students’ interest in reading (Yang, 2019). Teachers rarely take into account the importance of prior knowledge as one of the main issues with comprehension training at different competence levels. To make it more clear, Moroccan high school teachers do not provide their EFL readers with prior instructions or clear strategies to enable them to comprehend the reading material in the textbooks used. The paper highlights the importance of prior knowledge in teaching reading comprehension in order to come up with a successful classroom full of enjoyable and accurate comprehension. It is the role of the teacher to help their students become better readers by teaching them how to activate and use their prior knowledge.

Motivation is considered the heart of the learning process that is affected by many factors, among which there is gender. Therefore, the researcher conducted a quantitative research method to investigate the relationship between gender and motivation sub-themes while using problem-based learning. Nine female students and eleven male students of the second baccalaureate level participated in the current research through using the convenience sampling technique. The quasi-experimental research design, a quantitative research method, is used to conduct this study to analyze cause-effect relationships between the variables being studied. Then, the participants were given a five-point Likert scale questionnaire to fill in. The SPSS software was used to analyze data. The findings demonstrated that there was a positive relationship between gender and students’ achievement and motivation sub-themes.