Self constructs: Self-efficacy, self-concept, and identity

While self-related constructs such as self-efficacy, self-concept, and identity have not traditionally figured into reviews of individual differences in SLA (e.g., Dörnyei, 2005; Segalowitz, 1997; Skehan, 1989), the increasing interest and abundance of research in these areas in the past decade points toward their importance in the language learning process.

Continuing the trend from other areas of ID research, defining and distinguishing between these concepts is not at all straightforward, particularly since they represent expanding and changing areas of inquiry (Mercer, 2011). Not only do self-related constructs overlap with each other, but they also play significant roles in motivation, beliefs, affect, self-regulation, personality,

metacognition, and most other individual differences, thus making it impossible to draw

conclusive boundaries between each of these areas (Woodrow, 2011). What follows is simply a general description of how they have so far been defined and operationalized.

As fairly new adoptions into the SLA literature from psychology, self-efficacy and self- concept have not yet figured into many major SLA studies and are still vying for a place in the pantheon of SLA-IDs. While self-efficacy refers to “whether a learner feels that he/she can do a particular task” (Erler & Macaro, 2011, p. 500), self-concept is not only about “what one

believes about oneself and one’s abilities in a certain domain” but also “how one evaluates these beliefs and consequently how one feels about oneself in evaluative, affective terms” (Mercer, 2011, p. 13). The two constructs are therefore closely related—though self-efficacy has so far been researched more in SLA studies than self-concept—and it will be interesting to see how

SLA researchers distinguish between them as they become more well-known and more central to understanding individual differences.

Like many of the other ID constructs reviewed above, SLA research in this area leans heavily toward quantitative, questionnaire-based investigations. While some researchers (e.g., Du, 2012; Mills, Pajares, & Herron, 2007; Su & Duo, 2012) use existing instruments from educational psychology, others (e.g., Erler & Macaro, 2011; Hsieh & Schallert, 2008; Woodrow, 2011) adapt materials for L2 learners. In investigating writing self-efficacy, (Woodrow, 2011) presented learners with various writing tasks such as “write a sentence without mistakes” and “write an essay of argument or discussion,” asking learners to rate themselves for each activity on a Likert scale from “certain can do” to “certain cannot do” (p. 512-513). Erler and Macaro (2011), who looked specifically at self-efficacy in relation to phonological decoding, used a similar scale (“like me” to “not like me”) with questions such as “I can read French words out loud correctly” and “when I say French words in my head I know I am saying them correctly” (p. 507). Hsieh and Schallert (2008), on the other hand, took a very different approach to self-

efficacy. They gave learners a list of seven possible test scores, ranging from 70 to 100, and asked the learners how capable they were of achieving each score on their next foreign language test. Mills, Pajares, and Herron (2007) also used a similar measure of French grade self-efficacy but added another self-efficacy scale “to evaluate students’ perceptions of competence in using various self-regulated learning strategies” (p. 428).

In contrast to these questionnaire studies, Mercer’s (2011) qualitative investigation of self-concept consisted primarily of a series of in-depth interviews with a university-level English learner in Austria. This approach, which is quite unique for its case study format, grounded theory approach, and open acknowledgement of the indeterminate nature of mental constructs

such as self-concept, resulted in a model of L2 self-concept formation that includes factors both internal (belief systems, affect, domain-specific internal comparisons) and external (social comparison, perceived experiences of success/failure, past experiences of using or learning the language) to the learner. While this operationalization of self-concept has yet to be replicated in other contexts, it provides an interesting precedent for this new branch of ID research.

Despite the fact that language learning identity has traditionally been thought of in terms of its social and cultural dimensions rather than as an ID dimension (e.g., Norton, 2000), it is increasingly being cited in individual differences research as closely intertwined with motivation, beliefs, metacognition, and other ID factors (Duff, 2012). Of all the difficult-to-define individual differences, identity may be the most slippery and amorphous; indeed, two recent volumes (“Motivation, Language Identity and the L2 Self,” Dörnyei & Ushioda, 2009; and “Identity, Motivation and Autonomy in Language Learning,” Murray, Gao, & Lamb, 2011) provide book- length illustrations of the myriad ways that identity can be defined in relation to, or as part of, other IDs.

In the research context of differential learning experiences, identity is seldom defined, although several authors offer hints of how they view identity in connection with individual differences. Ushioda (2011) discusses three aspects of identity—situated identity, discourse identity, and transportable identity—and sees identity as molded by a learner’s culture, peers, and significant others. Noels (2009) connects identity to self-determination theory, maintaining that “the development of the self is characterized by the simultaneous processes of, on the one hand, becoming increasingly differentiated and refined as a result of new experiences, and, on the other hand, becoming more and more coordinated and cohesive” (p. 296). Menezes de

Oliveira e Paiva (2011) describes identity as “a complex system that displays a fractalized process of expansion as it is open to new experiences” (p. 62).

Not surprisingly for such a nebulous construct, identity has been theorized and discussed in the ID literature more than it has been operationalized. In contrast to most other individual differences research, the few ID-related identity studies (Huang, 2011; Menezes de Oliveira e Paiva, 2011) are almost exclusively qualitative, usually conducted through interviews or journal writing. In the thick description elicited through longitudinal investigations, identity is seen to emerge organically from each learner’s individual comments. For instance, in interviews with Japanese and Brazilian learners of English, Menezes de Oliveira e Paiva (2011) found that one student was inspired to learn English because of her identity as a Michael Jackson fan, while another was completely demotivated to learn English in school but later became highly motivated due to her identity as mother of an English-learning child. Huang (2011), in a four- year study of English majors at a Chinese university, discovered students whose “identity shifts from ‘lost-at-sea’ aimless first-year students to more confident future teachers” (p. 241). As these examples show, without an explicit and widely-accepted definition for this dimension of

individual differences, a great many different constructs might be interpreted and analyzed as identity.