The Interplay Among Academic Self-Concept, Self-Efficacy, Self-Regulation and Academic Achievement of Higher Education L2 Learners

Abstract

Self-concept, self efficacy, and self-regulation are three important factors that predict the success of L2 learners to a large extent. Therefore, the present study was designed to measure the academic self-concept, self efficacy, self-regulation level of higher education students in relation to academic achievement and self-evaluation and secondarily to investigate the correlation between academic self-concept, selfefficacy, and self-regulation. In the present study, academic self-concept was conceptualized as comprising of two main components: academic confidence and academic effort. The participants of the study are 130 higher education EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners enrolled in English Language and Literature department. Liu and Wang’s (2005) academic self-concept scale was used as the main data collection tool. It consists of two sub-scales; academic confidence and academic effort scales. A four-item questionnaire was formed by examining the literature in order to measure self-efficacy and Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ), developed by Pintrich et al. (1991), was used to measure self-regulation beliefs of students. Descriptive, variance, correlation and regression analyses were conducted in order to analyze the data. The results indicated that higher education Turkish EFL learners have a moderate-to-high level of self-concept, self-efficacy, self-regulation, and self-evaluation. High achieving students were found to have higher levels of selfregulation, self-evaluation and academic confidence. Correlation analysis indicated that all of the variables of the study are highly correlated with academic success and regression analysis revealed that self-efficacy was the most important predictor of academic success.