The impact of Self-Efficacy on Foreign Language Performance among High School Students

Abstract

In recent decades, the notions of self-efficacy and fear of failure have attracted considerable research attention in the field of educational psychology. However, research on the influence of these two variables on foreign language performance is limited, and empirical data about the potential mediating function of fear of failure in the mechanism of self-efficacy impacting academic performance is lacking. This study is conducted with Chinese high school students as the target population to investigate these two variables. A questionnaire is designed and analyzed to explore whether fear of failure mediates the relationship between self-efficacy and foreign language (FL) performance. This study finds that self-efficacy has no discernible effect on fear of failure, indicating that the indirect effect between these variables is also not significant. However, high school pupils’ performance in a foreign language is affected by their level of self-efficacy and their fear of failure, and the variables are independent of each other. Researchers believe that these two variables can be considered a set of psychological indicators of students’ perceptions of the academic curriculum, which can influence students’ foreign language performance. Furthermore, the results reveal that grade, language studied by students, beliefs about effort, and other factors also influence students’ foreign language performance.