Date of Award

4-22-2015

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Honors Thesis

Department

Education

Abstract

With many secondary and post-secondary institutions implementing foreign language requirements of at least two years of study of the same language, it is imperative that educators understand how to properly encourage their students so that they become motivated to complete the necessary language learning tasks. Moreover, foreign language teachers need to know how to motivate their students to continue learning the foreign language even after they have met their institution's requirements, so that the foreign language is eventually acquired as a second language by their students. In the current study, the interrelationship between achievement in the foreign language classroom and student self-efficacy and attributions will be examined to observe if high self-efficacy and internal, stable and internal causality attributions are sound predictors of high grades in intermediate level foreign language classrooms. Additionally, the self-efficacy levels and attributions will be compared between students who plan to continue their foreign language study to achieve either a minor or a major in the foreign language and those students who are simply taking the foreign language class to complete university requirements. Lastly, the current study seeks to validate the research of others (Hsieh & Kang, 2010; Hsieh & Schallert, 2008; Hsieh, 2004) by assessing whether a relationship exists between an individual's self-efficacy levels and their attributional habits.

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