The role of task value, effort-regulation, and ambiguity tolerance in predicting EFL learners’ test anxiety, learning strategies, and language achievement

Abstract

A primary objective of education is to prepare individuals to be effective learners. This entails developing the cognitive, motivational, and metacognitive knowledge. From the perspective of educational psychology, existing psychological paradigms present diverse visions of the nature of the learner. To be an effective learner, as Jarvis (2005) contended, involves adopting an eclectic position and developing an adequate level of each paradigm. This study is an attempt to identify and examine the interrelationship among a host of cognitive, motivational, and metacognitive variables within a single framework. In particular, task value, metacognitive self-regulation, and ambiguity tolerance and their role in predicting learner’s test anxiety, learning strategies, and language achievement were studied. The participants included 180 English as foreign language (EFL) learners with M.A. and B.A. degrees from a university in Mashhad, Iran. To measure the variables, two sets of questionnaires were employed. Task value, metacognitive self-regulation, test anxiety, and learning strategies were assessed through the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) developed by Pintrich et al. (1993). To gauge ambiguity tolerance, the Ambiguity Tolerance in Second Language Learning Questionnaire (SLAT) designed by Ely (1995) was utilized. The results estimated via structural equation modeling (SEM) revealed that learners’ self-regulation had a significant influence on language achievement. There was also a positive and direct association between cognitive components and metacognitive components. Additionally, it was found that the students’ motivational components had a significant association with cognitive components. Finally, motivational and cognitive factors indirectly influenced on language achievement.