Forethought Self-reflection
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perceptions comprise task conditions (referring to social context and time), instructional cues/ cognitive conditions including learning strategies, task knowledge, and motivational factors. Next stage is concerned with goal setting and planning, supported by information from past experience. The third stage, enacting, takes on tactics and strategies recognized in stage 2. Lastly, learners reflect upon the strategies they have adopted and make adaptations for a better outcome. The central essence of this model lies in metacognitive monitoring in which learners constantly produce internal feedback to detect the divergence between effects and criteria at each stage.
The feedback further guides learners to adjust strategies and this ability reveals how learners self-regulate in the learning process.
Figure 5. Winne & Hadwin’s (1998) Four-stage Model of Self-regulated Learning
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Pintrich’s General Framework of Self-Regulated learning
The framework demonstrates self-regulated learning can be broken into four phases: planning and goal setting, monitoring, control and regulation, and reflection.
Learners are regarded as constructive agent in the learning process, and all learners are potentially believed to possess the ability to monitor, control, and regulate the internal, behavioral, and external constructs. Pintrich (2000) claimed that self-regulated learners display positive self-efficacy beliefs and better management of time and effort.
Pintrich (2000) synthesized various self-regulation models and postulated a Phases
Areas for Regulation
Cognition Motivation/ Affect Behavior Context Planning &
Affective reactions Choice behavior Evaluation of task, context
Table 1
Pintrich’s (2000) General Framework for Self-Regulated Learning
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general working definition for self-regulated learning: “an active, constructive process whereby learners set goals for their learning and then attempt to monitor, regulate, and control their cognition, motivation, and behavior, guided and constrained by their goals and the contextual features in the environment (p. 453).” All the above models view learners as active and constructive agents who possess capabilities to monitor aspects of their own cognition and behavior in the learning process. Most importantly, the models of self-regulation demonstrated how comparisons are made to assess whether modifications should be adopted during the process (Pintrich, 2000). These basic assumptions should be served as a heuristic point to facilitate the current study to organize L2 self-regulation.
Various types of assessment tools have been developed in the investigation of self-regulation, such as self-report questionnaires (Weinstein, Schulte, & Palmer, 1987), interviews (Zimmerman & Martinez-Pons, 1986), think-aloud protocols (Pressley & Afflerbach, 1995), and observations (Turner, 1995), etc. Among the assessment tools, one particular scale, Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) (Pintrich, Smith, Garcia, & McKeachie, 1991), has been solidly constructed for self-regulation and motivation related research to “assess college students’ motivational orientations and their use of different learning strategies for a college course” (p. 3). Items are simple declarations and conditional relations using a 7-point Likert scale anchored by not all true of me (1) and very true of me (7). The item pool is composed of motivation (subdivided into expectancy, value, and affect) and learning strategies (cognitive, metacognitive, and resource management), 81 items in total. A sample of 356 university students and 24 community college students were recruited in the development of the inventory. Alpha internal consistency coefficients for subscales range from .52 to .92. It is concluded that “overall, the models show sound structures, and one can reasonably claim factor
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validity” (Pintrich et al., 1991, p.80).
Self-Regulation in L2 Research
Although there has been abundant research on self-regulation in educational psychology, few studies have intended to evaluate self-regulation in second language learning. Lin (2003) has attempted to validate his Self Regulatory Academic Learning Strategies Survey on three distinctive subject matters (Chinese, English, and math) to understand Taiwanese (vocational) high school students’ usage of strategies and the process of self-regulation, yet the nature of the study lay mainly in counseling psychology and it did not consolidate the research on language learning theories.
Besides, in Lin’s study, the researcher did not differentiate senior high school students and vocational high school students, which might reduce the explanatory power of the statistics in that these two groups have distinguished learning goals. In order to monitor and measure an individual’s self-regulatory capacity in L2 learning, Dörnyei (2001b) developed a classification of self-regulatory strategies from the area of educational psychology, based on Kuhl’s (1987) and Corno and Kanfer’s (1993) taxonomies of action control strategies, to scrutinize an individual’s language learning behavior. Self-regulatory strategies were formulated as following five subscales:
1. Commitment control, interpreted as one’s intentional techniques to help persist to or enhance individuals’ devotion to the goal. One can approach the tactics by means of envisioning the successful outcome or the negative consequences of discarding the goal.
2. Metacognitive control, which is executed to uphold concentration and to prevent procrastination by reminding oneself to focus and visualizing the harmful results of a lack of attention. Individuals are also vigilant of the deadline, purposefully ignore distractions and restrict counterproductive procrastinations, and develop
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defensive routines.
3. Satiation control, which prevents the tasks from boredom and adjoin extra spices and attractions by making the tasks more fun or challenging.
4. Emotion control, which deters meddlesome states of mind and generates positive emotions pertaining to the pursuit of the goal. Individuals plan to deal with pressure and anxiety and benefits from self-encouragement and relaxation.
5. Environmental control, which represents the elimination of interfering sources and temptations and promotes the supportive atmosphere in the surroundings.
Founded on the above sorting, Tseng, Dörnyei, and Schmitt (2006) offered a self-report instrument named “Self-Regulating Capacity in Vocabulary Learning Scale (SRCvoc),” whose items were composed of general declarations or conditional relations. With a series of elaborate statistical analyses using confirmatory and exploratory factor analysis, the proposed instrument has satisfactory psychometric properties and that the hypothesized theoretical model had a good fit with the data.
The five subscales: Commitment Control, Metacognitive Control, Satiation Control, Emotion Control, and Environment Control were thus confirmed to be legitimately representative for measuring self-regulatory capacity (confirmatory factor loadings from .69 to .88). SRCvoc was further integrated into developing a structural model that explains vocabulary knowledge and the process of motivation by Tseng and Schmitt (2008). In line with the process model of motivation, self-regulating capacity served as sustaining and realizing the initial motivation in the actional phase.
Self-regulating capacity was hypothesized to be a mediating role between learners’
intention to learn and further learning behaviors. The model indicated that learners’
self-regulation could directly influence the involvement of vocabulary learning (direct effect = .48), which proved that the system was the successful functioning of metacognitive regulation and involvement in L2 vocabulary learning.
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With the high reliability and validity of SRCvoc, it could be assumed that the scale can be viewed as “a heuristic point of departure in the (L2 research) realm”
(Tseng et al., 2006, p. 95) and be expanded to investigate other language learning spheres rather than vocabulary acquisition alone. Based on the structure, Liu (2008) modified SRCvoc and developed an item pool for the self-regulatory capacity in language learning scale (SRClang) to expand the scope of understanding self-regulation to general language learning contexts. Factor analysis was adopted to explore the underlying traits of self-regulation in English learning. The findings suggested that the underlying construct of self-regulation in English learning is unidimensional. Although the results from Liu (2008) demonstrated that self-regulatory capacity can positively predict learners’ use of learning strategies and self-perceived language proficiency, the study did not emphasize the precursors of SRC. To truly understand the motivational process, researchers must address factors that affect L2 learning in general (Tseng & Schmitt, 2008). Accordingly, further research is required to examine the preactioanl elements that influence action enactment in language learning.
Dörnyei and Ottó’s (1998) process model stands out as the basic structure of this study since it encompasses theoretical views by analyzing goal setting and self-regulation within a single theoretical framework for second language acquisition.
The dynamic perspective of motivation is particularly relevant to language learning, as learners have to study over an extended period of time. The model extends from the awakening of a person’s wishes and their setting a goal, through the self-regulatory processes necessary for successful action initiation, to the evaluative thoughts people have once goal striving has led to some outcome. It is this process model that deals most clearly and explicitly with the sequence of second language learning intentions and the cognitive processes involved in transforming what people want to do into
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what they do actually do. More specifically, the study will examine motivation as a process and investigate the extent to which goal intentions and implementation intentions can predict self-regulatory capacity in L2.
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