Journal of Language and Literature, ISSN: 2078-0303, Vol. 6. No. 2. Iss.2, May, 2015
PREDICTING UNIVERSITY STUDENTS' LEARNING PROGRESS IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE BASED ON THEIR TEST ANXIETY, ATTITUDE AND MOTIVATION 1
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Nader Hajloo , Zohreh Seifoori , Seyed Teymur Seyedi Asl , Farhad Azimi * 1
Associate Professor, Faculty of Educational Sciences and Psychology, Mohaghegh Ardabili University, Ardabil, 2 Associate Professor, Department of English, Tabriz Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tabriz, 3 Ph.D. Student, Faculty of Educational Sciences and Psychology, Mohaghegh Ardabili University, Ardabil, 4 Ph.D. Student, Department of English, Tabriz Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tabriz (IRAN) *Corresponding author:
[email protected] DOI: 10.7813/jll.2015/6-2/78 Received: 04 Feb, 2015 Accepted: 24 Mar, 2015 ABSTRACT
Learning a second language, especially English, has become vital for success, both academically and professionally vital in today’s world. Many factors contribute to students’ academic achievements. This study was carried out to determine whether test anxiety, attitude, intrinsic and instrumental motivation play any role in academic achievement of university students in English or not. To this end, 250 questionnaires (Attitude assessment scale and Sarason and Mandler’s test anxiety assessment scale) were distributed among the students from the Payame Noor Universities of MeshkinShahr and Qazvin and the Islamic Azad University of Meshkin Shahr. After they were filled out and collected, only 227 of them were selected and analyzed. It was found out that test anxiety criteria has a negative relation with academic achievem ent; whereas, the correlation among the students' attitudes, intrinsic and instrumental motivation and the academic achievement were positive. Moreover these three variables, together, were able to predict 24% of the variance in academic achievement of the students in English language. This strongly suggests that these variables do impact academic achievement. Key words: academic achievement, attitude, test anxiety, intrinsic motivation, instrumental motivation 1. INTRODUCTION Nowadays, English language has become the Lingua Franca and medium of communication in various fields such as economics, finance, banking, science, technology, culture and international relations in the world. In addition, it is widely accepted that achieving fluency in English language is an instrumental success in life (Gomleksi, 2010). Furthermore, over 90% of the scientific articles are published in English language. Consequently, many people, especially university students, put forth a great deal of effort to learn this language. In Iranian universities, as with the other non-English speaking countries, taking English courses is mandatory for all the students. Academic progress in English language could increase the students’ job opportunities and guarantee continuing their education at higher academic levels. Academic progress in learning a second language and the factors affecting it has been of great interest to researchers for decades. They have pointed out to many factors which contribute to academic progress. Test anxiety is one of the factors which have, right from the start, been associated with it. Ziedner (1998, cited in Chamorro, Permuzic, Ahmetoglu & Furnham, 2008) defined test anxiety as a set of phenomenological, physiological and behavioral responses that accompany concern about possible negative consequences or failure on an exam or similar evaluative situation. Ellis (1999 cited in Jain & Sidhu, 2013) divides anxiety into two types: facilitative and debilitative. The facilitative anxiety leads to the students trying hard to learning English; whereas, the debilitative anxiety leads to students avoiding learning it. Test anxiety, which is a type of anxiety, is the consequence of the debilitative aspects of anxiety and shows itself when one is getting ready for an exam or is in the process of taking it (Onyeizughbo, 2010) Ziedner (1998 cited in Chamorro, Permuzic, Ahmetoglu & Furnham, 2008) defines test anxiety as a set of phenomenological, physiological and behavioral responses that accompany concern about possible negative consequences or failure on an exam or similar evaluative situation. There are many researches, both in the laboratory settings and environments such as universities and schools have shown that test anxiety hinders people’s academic progress (Goetz, Preckel, Zeidner, & Schleyer, 2008). Moreover, Du introduces a type of anxiety and calls it language anxiety. This type of anxiety, according to Du, has three elem ents: fear of communication, test anxiety and fear of being assessed as poor (Du, 2010). Thus, it seems that there is an association between academic progress in English language and test anxiety. However, other than test anxiety, motivation is considered to be an important factor for succeeding in learning a foreign language. Gardner (1985, cited in Jain & Sidhu, 2013) defines motivation as a force which motivates an individual to try and work hard to learn a language. Nowadays, both researchers and teachers consider motivation to be a vital and instrumental factor which affects the degree of success in learning a second language (Ghazvini & Khajepour, 2011). Some researchers have gone further by claiming that motivation is the primary factor in learning a language and directly impacts learning of a language (Gomleksiz, 2010). Several models have been offered on the effect of motivation on learning. One main model points out that two types of motivation, Intrinsic and Extrinsic motivation, could affect learning. The common belief is that the intrinsic motivation is deeper and stronger than the extrinsic motivation; and its impact, probably, is longer lasting (Zhu & Leung, 2011). The third factor which could contribute to learning English language is attitude. The attitude of a university student towards learning another language is one of the factors which could be used to predict a language learners success in learning a language. The researches have shown that having a positive attitude towards learning a language is a good start in learning it (Bidin, Jusoff, abdul Aziz, Mohamad Salleh, & Tajudin, 2009; omleksiz, 2010). Attitude towards a language could be positive or negative (Youssef, 2012). Positive attitude of a person towards learning a second language will strengthen his/her motivation for learning that language (Jain & Sidhu, 2013). It seems that beside the direct impact of attitude on academic progress, the interactive effect of attitude and motivation play a vital role in learning a second language.
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Journal of Language and Literature, ISSN: 2078-0303, Vol. 6. No. 2. Iss.2, May, 2015 For example, CsizE’R and colleagues showed that positive attitude could increase the motivational behaviors of the learners (CsizE’R, Kormos, & Sarkadi, 2010). Al-Tamimi and Shuib have also shown that motivation of the learners for learning a language is influenced by their attitude towards that language (Al-Tamimi & Shuib, 2009). Considering the existing body of research and the confusion which surrounds this field of, this study was carried out to see whether students’ academic progress could be predicted based on their motivation, attitude and test anxiety or not. The point worth mentioning is that most of the conducted research on factors affecting educational progress have only dealt with limited variables. Therefore, since the present study aims to offer a model for predicting educational progress, it is considered to be a new study. 2. MATERIALS AND METHODS 2.1. Procedure and participants This research is a descriptive-correlation type. To gather the data, first, lists of undergraduate classes in Pyame Noor and Islamic Azad university of Meshkin Shahr, Ardebil province, were obtained. Then, using cluster sampling method, 10 classes were selected and the research questionnaire was distributed among the students in those classes. The process of gathering 250 questionnaires took two weeks. Out of 250 collected questionnaires, only 227 of them were completely filled and suitable fot analysis. The main criteria for being included among the participants in this study was having passed a general Enlish class and having got a mark for it. 2.2. Research instruments 2.2.1. Attitude assessment scale This scale (questionnaire) was translated into Farsi by Shirbagi and Azizi (2010) from English. It was reviewed and revised by both a few instructors who taught English and a few who taught Farsi at Sanandaj and Tabriz University. This questionnaire contained 43 questions and seven sub-scales. In the present study, only three of these sub-scales, namely attitude, intrinsic motivation and instrumental motivation were used. Among Iranian population, this questionnaire, having a Chronbach Alpha coefficient value of 0.80, benefited from a suitable validity (Shirbagi & Azizi, 2010). 2.2.2. Sarason and Mandler’s test anxiety assessment scale Sarason and Mandler’s test anxiety scale contains 37 questions. This scale is a short questionnaire which those who answer it must provide a true or false answer to each question. Using the answers, one could determine mental states and physiological experiences of the participants before, after and during the test based on a self-assessment method. Reliability coefficient for this scale is reported to be 0.88 (Lashkaripour, Bakhshani, & Solaimani, 2007). 2.3. Analysis of the data In this study, Lisrel software was used to analyze the data. To determine whether the data is normally distributed, Kolmorov-Smirnov test was employed. Moreover, to analyze the path, linear regression was utilized. 3. RESULTS In this study, out of the total 227 university students who participated, 90 (39.1%) were male and 137 (59.6%) were female. 188 students (81.7%) were single and 38 (16.5) were married. The average age of the participants was 22.36 with a standard deviation of 4.09. 82 of the students (35.7%) were freshman, 59 (27.7%) were sophomore, 34 (14.8%) were junior and 21 (9.1%) were seniors. In addition, 34 of the participants had not mentioned what year they are. To study the relationship between academic achievem ent and test anxiety, attitude, intrinsic motivation and instrumental motivation, Pearson correlation was used. The result showed that test anxiety criteria has a negative relation with academic achievement; whereas, the correlation between students' attitudes, intrinsic and instrumental motivation were positive(table 1). Table 1. Mean, standard deviation, mutual correlation coefficient among the criteria of the study Number 1 2 3 4 5
Variables Academic achievement test anxiety Instrumental motivation intrinsic motivation attitude
mean 15.2 17.69 50.03 12.29 17.83
Standard deviation 3.13 6.43 8.43 2.83 3.11
1 1 -0.329** 0.130 0.430** 0.407**
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3
4
5
1 -0/171** -0/253** -0/316**
1 0/329** 0/403**
1 0/550**
1
Furtherm ore, since another objective of the research was to study the role of test anxiety, attitude, intrinsic and instrumental motivation in predicting academic achievement in English course among the students, step-wise linear regression was also carried out. In predicting the academic achievem ent, in the first step, intrinsic motivation was able to predict 18% of the variance in the variable. In step two, with inclusion of the test anxiety variable, this percentage reached 22%. In step three, another variable, attitude, was added to the other two variables. These three variables, together, were able to predict 24% of the variance in academic achievement of the students in English language (table 2). Table 2. Stepwise linear regression for predicting university students' academic achievement in English using test anxiety, attitude and motivation Dependent variable
Step 1 2
Achievement 3
Independent variable Intrinsic motivation Intrinsic motivation Test anxiety Intrinsic motivation Test anxiety attitude
R 0.42
R2 018
R3 0.17
F 33.01
P P
