Our study explores how emotions, motivation, and self-efficacy beliefs about English classes in general and language tasks in particular shape secondary school students' task performance on a written narrative task. Results suggest that links can be established between emotions, engagement/flow and self-efficacy and different task performance measures, as well as the quantity of output produced.
The present talk explores how individual difference (ID) variables, particularly emotions, motivation, flow/engagement and self-efficacy beliefs shape secondary school students' task performance on a written narrative task. We decided to focus on task performance-related variables because establishing links between ID variables and performance on tasks can help us better understand the classroom-level processes of instructed second language acquisition (ISLA) by shedding light on different features of the output produced by students in language classes. We collected data from 52 secondary school students in Hungary. Two standardized questionnaires, one measuring students' emotions, motivation, and self-efficacy beliefs in the EFL classroom in general and a shortened version of this questionnaire measuring the same IDs after task execution, were employed for data collection in order to investigate the relationship of the classroom (trait-like) and task (state-like) versions of the ID variables, while language output was captured with the help of two versions of a piloted narrative task. Students' task performance was analysed using syntactic and lexical complexity, and accuracy besides the amount of output produced. Our findings show that relationships can be established between the classroom and task versions of the questionnaires as well as the task questionnaire results and task output measures. In particular, we found negative relationships between negative emotions and certain task performance measures while engagement/flow and self-efficacy correlated positively with the quantity of output produced, and self-efficacy was also negatively correlated with accuracy. These findings suggests that EFL teachers should use tasks that engage students besides promoting their self-efficacy beliefs in order to enhance students' language performance.
