Theories on Expectancy

Research on the correlation of achievement and the success and failure of learners has been focused on self-efficacy for the past few decades. Self-efficacy is defined as the belief in one’s own ability to finish tasks and reach goal, which is able to predict the learning preference motivation of students. Students would experience a sense of efficacy while attaining a goal; that is, their ability to persist the goal is highly related to their ability to succeed in tasks (Schunk 1990). It is suggested that self-efficacy theory has an influence on how people feel, think, and behave, and also to ensure how long each individual will stick to tasks (Bandura, 1993, 1994).

The self-efficacy theory was proposed by Bandura based on his social cognitive theory, suggesting that the self-efficacy that one possesses would have an impact on the choice of activity a person pursues, their efforts and how a person would react to adversities. Based on Bandura’s (1986, 1993, 1997) work, he defined motivation as a goal-directed behaviour persistent by outcome expectations and self-efficacy. Outcome expectations concern what leads to the consequences of actions; self-efficacy expectations are beliefs to perform those actions successfully. For example, students may believe a specific action is able to lead to academic success, but they do not believe they have the ability to productively accomplish the action. It is possible for students to have high or low outcome expectation belief but relatively high or low self-efficacy belief for a task. Furthermore, following research focusing student efficacy for performing a task stated that outcome expectations are dependent on self-efficacy. Bandura further explained that ‘if you control for how well people judge they can perform, you can account for much of the variance in the kinds of outcomes they expect” (Bandura, 1986:393). Stronger self-efficacy beliefs, as

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Schunk explained, are associated with higher goals and appear to have higher probability to remain the goal (Schunk and Swartz, 1993).

Bandura (1982) further indicated four crucial factors in determining one’s self-efficacy for a given achievement, which includes previous performance; various learning; verbal encouragement by others; and one’s physiological reaction. Further to this, researchers discovered that learners with higher self-efficacy are those who have positive previous performance, higher self-efficacy belief, encouraged by their peers, and have low anxiety symptoms when performing a task (Schunk, 1990). Considerable studies have examined the theory and have found a correlation between perceived self-efficacy and persistence (Pajares, 1996; Schunk and Pajares, 2005; Zimmerman, 2000). According to the theory, people with high self-efficacy are more likely to perceive difficult task as something to be mastered; they try their best to perform the task successfully. In contrast, people with low self-efficacy tend to perceive difficult tasks as threats, and are likely to abandon when they encounter perceived difficulty (Bandura and Cervon, 1983; 1986; Schunk, 1995; Salomon, 1984). In addition to this, self-efficacy was more related to cognitive factors, such as other people’s opinion, encouragement and re-enforcement, previous experiences. It is the key element to influence the choice of task, effort, and persistence. (Schunk and Swartz, 1993; Chase, 2001).

It has been suggested that student self-efficacy is associated with academic success (Schunk, Pintrich and Meece, 2008; Lane and Lane, 2001; Wood and Locke, 1987), and it has been shown in some studies as an important mediator of achievement behaviour (Multon, Brown and Lent, 1991; Schunk and Pajares, 2005; Schunk 1981, 1982, 1983, 1987). Research on self-efficacy has supported previous findings that student belief in ability has a significant impact to their achievement in school. In a series of studies in self-efficacy, Schunk (1982, 1983, 1984, 1987, 1996) encountered that self-efficacious students perform better in academic results than those who with lower self-efficacy. Results of these studies support broadly the Social Cognitive Theory of Bandura (1986) that hypothesised self-efficacy as a role of predicting learner’s achievement.

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Considerable support for the relationship between self-efficacy and academic achievement has been found over the past three decades in different fields, focusing mainly in the field of Science, Maths, and Sports. For example, Schunk (1981) found the effect of self-efficacy belief, persistence, and student performance in arithmetic instruction. Chase, Feltz and Fitzpatrick (1995) also discovered that a positive correlation of higher self-efficacy with not only persistence but also in motivation in the area of sports. There is, however, scant research of self-efficacy within the language learning realm. Hsieh (2004) examined the relationship between students regarding language learning, self-efficacy, attributional belief, and achievement in an actual achievement setting. She confirmed results from the study by Pajares and Miller (1994) that student self-efficacy beliefs are associated with their previous experience, their outcomes, and her subsequent study on self-efficacy and attribution theories in foreign language courses also support the hypothesis that self-efficacy is also a strong predictor to anticipate achievement (Hsieh and Schallert, 2008). Therefore, there is a need to introduce self-efficacy in the field of language learning motivation.

2.3.3 Theories integrating expectancy and value