Contributions of (de)motivation, engagement, and anxiety to English listening and speaking

By Xue Zhang, Shenghai Dai, Yuliya Ardasheva. 2020

108 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract The fundamental curricular and assessment changes in Chinese EFL higher education have increased motivation and effort among learners to advance their English listening and speaking (ELS) competencies; the resistance and reluctance, however, still persist. Drawing on L2 (de)motivation theories, this path model study in vestigated predictors (de/motivation) and mediators (engagement, anxiety) of ELS attainment and intention to continue among 591 Chinese college EFL learners. The L2 motivation model highlights the Ideal L2 Self and the L2 Learning Experience as having the strongest mediated impacts on ELS achievement via engagement. In the L2 demotivation model, experience with failure emerged as the strongest demotivator of ELS achievement. The results of the combined model indicate that L2 motivation outweighs L2 demotivation in terms of their relative contributions to both ELS achievement and intention to continue. The overall results suggest that while teacher-, skill- and test-oriented pedagogical approaches may enhance Chinse EFL learners' ELS achievement, to some extent, a teaching approach supporting L2 motivation and engagement should be the future.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Language and Linguistics, Literature and Literary Theory

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fb72b3edd4c3e6f60db874c0986f471c1e180936