MECHANISMS LINKING BELIEFS AND LANGUAGE ACHIEVEMENT OF THAI EFL UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS: A STRUCTURAL EQUATION MODEL

Abstract

This study aimed at 1) examining English achievement levels of Thai EFL undergraduate students, 2) describing their beliefs, attitudes, motivation and language learning strategies, and 3) exploring the causal relationships among beliefs, attitudes, motivation, language learning strategies, and language achievement. The total of 848 participants enrolling in two foundation English courses at Prince of Songkla University (PSU), Surat Thani Campus were included. The instruments comprised Achievement Tests and a set of questionnaire. The findings revealed that most participants were less proficient learners. Their problematic points were limited vocabulary and grammatical knowledge, misspelling, and mispronunciation. They believed that vocabulary, culture, grammar and translation knowledge, including learning in English-speaking countries were very important in English learning. Beliefs, thus, seem to be essential foundation for their language learning. However, most of them did not believe that they had special abilities to learn a foreign language. They expressed their positive attitudes toward English-speaking people and teachers, but did not do so toward English courses. They realized the importance of English in terms of integrative and instrumental orientation. The participants reflected their anxiety in English use and English class. They only expected themselves to do simple tasks/activities. They held high motivational intensity, but did not show their full attention nor great persistence in learning. Moreover, the participants were moderate strategy users. With SEM technique, the two achievement models showed that attitudes, self-efficacy and motivational behavior were mediators causally linking the beliefs and achievement, and all the path coefficients were statistically significant, except the one from language learning strategies to achievement. The models fitted to the data well.