EFL students' attitudes towards self-regulated learning strategies in academic writing

Shirin Abadikhah, Zahra Aliyan and Seyed Hassan Talebi
University of Mazandaran, Iran

The aim of the present study was to investigate EFL university students' attitude towards self-regulated learning strategies in writing academic papers. A further aim of the study was to compare the attitudes of two groups of university students (third and fourth years) in the employment of self-regulated learning strategies to find out whether academic education assists students to becoming more self-regulated writers with the passage of time. A questionnaire was developed and administered to 98 college students majoring in English language. The questionnaire consisted of 60 items assessing six dimensions of self-regulated learning, namely, motive, methods, time, physical environment, social environment, and performance. Descriptive analyses revealed that the participants were moderate to slightly high in the use of self-regulatory strategies and processes. Furthermore, the findings indicated that certain writing strategies including pre-writing, goal-setting and self-consequence were not appropriately employed by the participants, suggesting an important need to acquire additional strategies for their writing. Using independent samples t-tests, we found that the fourth year students more frequently employed self-regulatory learning strategies in writing (i.e. method and social environment) than did the third year students in this study. The implications of the study which may benefit writing instructors are discussed.
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Authors: Dr Shirin Abadikhah (corresponding author) is an assistant professor of TEFL in the Department of English Language & Literature at the University of Mazandaran, Iran. She holds a PhD in applied linguistics from The University of Edinburgh, UK. Her general research interests include applied linguistics and English education. Email: abadikhah@umz.ac.ir Zahra Aliyan holds an MA in TEFL from the University of Mazandaran. Her research interests include teaching writing and classroom interaction. Email: zahra.aliyan88@gmail.com) Seyed Hassan Talebi is an assistant professor in the English department of the University of Mazandaran, Iran, where he conducts research, lectures and supervises BA and MA students. He specialises in teaching English as a foreign language and his main research interest is cross-linguistic transfer studies. Email: hstalebi@umz.ac.ir Please cite as: Abadikhah, S., Aliyan, Z. & Talebi, S. H. (2018). EFL students' attitudes towards self-regulated learning strategies in academic writing. Issues in Educational Research, 28(1), 1-17. http://www.iier.org.au/iier28/abadikhah.pdf