Recent motivation models depict learners as actively attaching meanings to their learning situations, with students’ beliefs about their capabilities to deploy control over a given task assumed to play an important role in their actions, motivation, and achievement (Bandura, 1977, Schunk, 1991 and Weiner, 1985). Bandura, 1977 and Bandura, 1997 self-efficacy theory and Weiner, 1976 and Weiner, 2000 attribution theory represent two perspectives that have contributed substantially to an understanding of students’ beliefs and explanations of their achievement. Self-efficacy refers to the beliefs that individuals have about their capabilities to complete a particular task successfully ( Bandura, 1995). Attributions refer to the explanations individuals give for their success or failure in a particular performance, explanations that were described by Weiner (1986) along three dimensions, locus, stability, and control. Both constructs have generated extensive lines of research connecting each to performance, persistence, and emotions. For example, self-efficacy has consistently been shown to be positively associated with general academic achievement (e.g., Jackson, 2002, Lane and Lane, 2001, Pajares, 1996b, Pajares and Kranzler, 1995, Pintrich and De Groot, 1990, Schunk, 1981, Schunk, 1984 and Wood and Locke, 1987) and with performance in several specific domains, including math ( Pajares and Miller, 1994 and Pajares and Miller, 1995), writing ( Pajares, 2003, Pajares et al., 2000 and Pajares and Johnson, 1996), and sports ( Bond et al., 2001 and Chase, 2001). As for the work on attributions, Weiner, 1977 and Weiner, 2000 maintained that attributions come from students’ self-perceptions and can influence their expectancy, values, emotions, and beliefs about their competence, and in turn influence their motivation. Differences in attributions were reported for individuals differing by gender ( Nelson and Cooper, 1997 and Pintrich and Schunk, 2002), culture ( Graham, 1991, Graham, 1994 and Holloway, 1988), self-esteem ( Betancourt and Weiner, 1982, Fitch, 1970 and Skaalvik, 1994), and by success or failure in performance ( Carr and Borkowski, 1989 and Kristner et al., 1988). The latter has been especially well researched with constructs such as adaptive and maladaptive attributions ( Dweck and Elliott, 1983, Peterson et al., 1993 and Seegers et al., 2004) being offered to explain when it might be good to attribute one’s performance to ability and when effort attributions might be more adaptive. However, the two constructs of self-efficacy and attributions have rarely been combined to explain students’ beliefs about their performance nor have they frequently been applied to the domain of foreign language learning.
The purpose of our study was to examine the three-way relationship in a foreign language setting between attributions, self-efficacy, and performance. This study is especially innovative because students’ attributions for test outcomes were measured as soon as test grades were returned to students. Whereas previous attribution studies used scenarios and hypothetical events to ask about individuals’ reasons for the outcomes, our measures asked about students’ attributions for an event that was pertinent and salient to them. Also, many attribution studies reported in the past focused either on attributional dimensions solely (e.g., Bond et al., 2001 and Stajkovic and Sommer, 2000) or asked students to make attributions for hypothetical success and failure for the same task (e.g., Chase, 2001, Schunk and Gunn, 1986 and Shores and Shannon, 2007). Instead, we used both an attributional dimension measure and a questionnaire asking students to rate actual reasons for their grade so as to gain multiple perspectives on students’ attributional beliefs. Another innovation was that the students themselves determined whether the outcomes of their tests represented a successful or unsuccessful performance.
