Personality, Motivation, Anxiety, Strategies, and Language Proficiency of Japanese Students

要旨

This study is the lirst io simultaneously examinc the relationships anong live language learning variables (personality, motivation, anxiety, leaning strategies, and language proficiency) as they cooccur in a group of students with a single language background. The 320 students in this study were all Japanese nationals enrolled in the Intensive English Language Program at Temple Univenity Japan in Tokyo. The six insruments were: the Yatabe-Guilford Personalily Inventory, the Attitude/MIotivation Test Battery, the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale, the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning, a cloze test, and the structure subtest of the Michigan Placement Test. Descriptive statistics indicated the characteristics of Japaness students. Cronbach alpha analysis indicated that the personality, motivation, anxiety, and learning strategies measures were all reasonably reliable in this situation. Factor analysis (with varimax rotation), used to study the validity of the instruments, indicated a reasonably high degree of convergence of subscales within the measures and divergence between measures. Discriminant function analysis showed that five of the subscales reliably classified students into high, middle, and low proficiency groups, two on the first function (between low proficiency students and the other two groups) and three on the second function (between high proficiency students and the other two groups). The classifications were shown to be 55.19% accurate overall (with 66.3% accuracy in classirying low proliciency students, 48.1% for middle proficiency students, and 51.5% for high proficiency students). Patterns in the intercorrelations ofthe subscales are also interpreted and discussed.This study is the lirst io simultaneously examinc the relationships anong live language learning variables (personality, motivation, anxiety, leaning strategies, and language proficiency) as they cooccur in a group of students with a single language background. The 320 students in this study were all Japanese nationals enrolled in the Intensive English Language Program at Temple Univenity Japan in Tokyo. The six insruments were: the Yatabe-Guilford Personalily Inventory, the Attitude/MIotivation Test Battery, the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale, the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning, a cloze test, and the structure subtest of the Michigan Placement Test. Descriptive statistics indicated the characteristics of Japaness students. Cronbach alpha analysis indicated that the personality, motivation, anxiety, and learning strategies measures were all reasonably reliable in this situation. Factor analysis (with varimax rotation), used to study the validity of the instruments, indicated a reasonably high degree of convergence of subscales within the measures and divergence between measures. Discriminant function analysis showed that five of the subscales reliably classified students into high, middle, and low proficiency groups, two on the first function (between low proficiency students and the other two groups) and three on the second function (between high proficiency students and the other two groups). The classifications were shown to be 55.19% accurate overall (with 66.3% accuracy in classirying low proliciency students, 48.1% for middle proficiency students, and 51.5% for high proficiency students). Patterns in the intercorrelations ofthe subscales are also interpreted and discussed.This study is the lirst io simultaneously examinc the relationships anong live language learning variables (personality, motivation, anxiety, leaning strategies, and language proficiency) as they cooccur in a group of students with a single language background. The 320 students in this study were all Japanese nationals enrolled in the Intensive English Language Program at Temple Univenity Japan in Tokyo. The six insruments were: the Yatabe-Guilford Personalily Inventory, the Attitude/MIotivation Test Battery, the Foreign Language Classroom

主題