Individual differences in second language learning: Educational studies on self-efficacy, gender, motivation and willingness to communicate

Language learning is a complex process, with many factors at the student, class, school and societal level playing a role. This dissertation comprises three studies that focus on the role of student-level variables in acquiring a language other than the mother tongue, i.e., a second language (L2). Each study relies on standardized proficiency tests and on questionnaire data from large, representative samples of students learning English, French or German in European secondary schools. The first study investigates the English L2 self-efficacy beliefs of over 22,500 European fifteen-year-olds. Their listening, reading and writing proficiency is compared to their endorsement of twelve can-do statements that are taken from the Common European Framework of Reference. Four-level logistic regression analyses reveal positive correlations between both elements, but also a significant influence of the students’ gender andnbsp;Country differences are rather prominent, with tendencies towards over- or under-estimation showing striking similarities between both receptive skills. Overall, boys tend to have higher self-efficacy beliefs than equally proficient girls, but this pattern is reversed when students are presented with the easiest task descriptions. Interaction terms between countries and gender only point to cross-country variation in boy-girl differences for reading self-efficacy. Whereas the first study relates the students’ gender to their self-efficacy beliefs, the second study discusses its relation to the students’ proficiency across three languages, three skills and fourteen countries. English is an exception to the general tendency for girls to surpass boys’ L2 skills, with boys sometimes performing sig­nificantly better than girls. Writing turns out to be more prone to gender differences than listening or reading. Cross-country variation in the gender gap supports the hypothesis that gender is primarily a social factor rather than a biological factor in learning. Multilevel mediation analyses with constituents of motivation indeed show that in most cases where girls outperform boys, a significant part of this advantage can be explained by the differential appeal of the students’ L2 course and by the instrumental, integrative and intrinsic value that students attribute to the L2. The third study narrows the language learning context to French L2 in Flanders to determine the complex interactions between a larger set of student-level variables. The students’ self-assessment, their L2 proficiency and constituents of their motivation are joined with language anxiety in a structural equation model to investigate the construct of willingness to communicate (WTC). A model for WTC in the classroom context is contrasted with a model for societal L2 use. In both contexts, integrativeness, perceived competence and anxiety exert a direct influence on the students’ WTC. Classroom WTC is a strong basis for real-world WTC but in the latter, the role of integrativeness decreases while anxiety levels play a larger role. Together the three studies illustrate how a comparative, large-scale approach can be a powerful aid in testing theories and contributing to the existing knowledge base on L2 learning. They also point to the need to acknowledge variation across contexts in the functioning of learner variables. Regardless of this variation, each study also reveals an important role for individual differences in determining outcomes of the learning process, whether it be mastering a language, being willing to use that language, or being able to identify strengths and weaknesses in one’s own proficiency level to enable lifelong learning.status: publishe