THE IMPACT OF ACADEMIC GOAL MOTIVES ON LANGUAGE LEARNING STRATEGIES

Abstract

Goals drive individuals to perform better by providing them with focus and direction. For this reason, it is essential to emphasize learners’ academic goals and their goal sources in the EFL context. The primary aim of this mixed study is to determine EFL students’ academic goal motives and examine them in terms of the demographic variables, gender, and the university type they study. This study also investigates the impact of EFL learners’ academic goal motives on their use of language learning strategies. The data were collected through Personal Information Form, Oxford’s (1990) Strategy Inventory for Language Learning, Academic Goal Motives Scale (Pasban & Narafsan, 2020) and a semi-structured interview. A total of 253 (155 females, 98 males) students studying at preparatory schools in Bitlis, Denizli, İstanbul, and Samsun participated in the study. In the quantitative section, the data were analyzed using the Independent Sample t-test, MANOVA, Pearson Correlation, and Regression. In order to analyze the qualitative data, content analysis was used. The quantitative results showed that academic goal motives of EFL learners are mastery, future achievement, self-made duty, and family-oriented. The qualitative results supported these findings and revealed that self-presentation is also an important goal motive for EFL learners. In addition to this, MANOVA results showed that there are significant differences between some subdomains of academic goal motives based on gender. While peer-oriented and fake goodness academic goal motives of males are significantly higher than females, males’ future achievement and self-made duty motives are significantly lower than females. According to the findings, there is no relationship between academic goal motives and the university type students study. Finally, it was concluded that EFL learners’ academic goal motives have an impact on their frequent and diverse use of language learning strategies. Keywords: goals, academic goal motives, language learning strategies