A Dynamic Model of EFL Learners' Personal Best Goals, Resilience, and Language Achievement

Abstract

One of the objectives of any educational endeavor is helping students to adopt a set of personal goals for their achievement. This is known as personal best (PB) referring to personalized goals or standards of excellence that match or exceed one's prior best in the academic context. It is also believed that PB goals can fluctuate in line with other academic-associated factors. The aim of the present study is to scrutinize these goals in association with students' resilience and language achievement. In other words, this study elucidated how EFL learners' PB and resilience influence language achievement. To do so, 173 students studying in two private language institutes and a university completed two questionnaires. The former was PB scale designed by Martin (2006) measuring specific, challenging, competitively self-referenced, and self- improvement goals. It was then translated and validated by the present researchers. The latter was the resilience scale containing five dimensions of perceived happiness, empathy, sociability, persistence, and self-regulation. The questionnaire was designed and validated by Kim and Kim (2016) and then translated and validated in this study. The results of confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) demonstrated the validity of the Persian versions of the scales. The results of structural equation modeling (SEM) also indicated that PB is a positive and significant predictor of resilience. Moreover, it was found that language achievement is predicted by both PB and resilience.

Keywords

• competitively self-referenced goals
• challenging goals
• EFL learners
• language achievement
• personal best goals
• resilience