The Effect of Specific Goals on EFL Students' Self-efficacy and Performance of Vocabulary Learning

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was two-fold. First, it investigated the relative effects of the specific goal and the vague goal on EFL students' self-efficacy and performance of vocabulary learning. Second, it aimed to obtain in-depth understandings of the teacher's and the students' perceptions about the goal setting in the study. One hundred and two junior high school students and their English teacher participated in the study. The students were divided into two different groups, i.e., specific goal group (experimental group) and vague goal group (control group). Both groups were instructed 25 new vocabulary words by the same EFL teacher. Prior to the instruction, all participants were informed that a test on the 25 vocabulary words would be given three days after the instruction. Meanwhile, each student in the experimental group was assigned an individual goal regarding the test by the teacher. The students of the control group were told to ”do your best” and ”work hard” for the test as their goal.Both quantitative and qualitative methods were used. Student self-efficacy questionnaire responses and the vocabulary test scores of these two groups were compared at the end of the experiment. The t-test results showed that the experimental group outperformed the control goal group in both the vocabulary test and self-efficacy scores, which suggested that setting specific goals was more effective in enhancing students' self-efficacy and performance. In addition to the quantitative analysis, qualitative techniques such as student journals and the teacher interview were employed to obtain in-depth understandings about the students' and teacher's perceptions of the goal setting in this study. It was found that students and the teacher both perceived setting specific goals as an effective way to enhance learning motivation and self-efficacy.