Exploring Senior High School EFL Students' Motivation, Strategy Use, and English Achievement via Structural Equation Modeling

Abstract

This study explored the relationships of senior high school EFL students' motivation, strategy use, and English achievement. The first two attempts of the study were to investigate how well the senior high school EFL students' motivation and strategy use can predict students' English achievement respectively. The third attempt was to explore the causal relationship among senior high school EFL students' motivation, strategy use, and English achievement.Totally 132 senior high EFL school boy students took part in the study. Two questionnaires-Motivation Questionnaire (Chen, 2008; Lai, 2008) and Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL, version 7.0)-were used for data collecting.With SPSS for Windows Version 17.0, data analysis, including item analysis, exploratory factor analysis (EFA), reliability analysis, and validity analysis, was used. Furthermore, Structural equation modeling (SEM) was adopted through second-order confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) in LISREL 8.8 to confirm the causal relationships among senior high school EFL students' motivation, strategy use, and English achievement.The causal relationships between motivation and English achievement and between strategy use and English achievement were both proved. Motivation could account for 39% of the total variance toward English achievement while strategy use could account for 19% of the total variance toward English achievement. Intrinsic Motivation and Utilitarian Purpose took up the most variance toward English achievement, whereas Metacognitive Strategies was the only individual factor contributing to the total variance toward English achievement. The relationship among senior high school EFL students' motivation, strategy use, and English achievement was a full mediating model with a reciprocal relationship between strategy use and English achievement.