THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SELF-EFFICACY BELIEFS, LOCUS OF CONTROL AND READING COMPREHENSION ABILITY OF IRANIAN EFL ADVANCE LEARNERS

Self_efficacy and Locus of control are believed to affect learnersʹ academic achievement. This effect has scarcely been researched in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) context. This co-relational study explored the relationship between self-efficacy beliefs, Locus of control and reading comprehension level of Iranian EFL advance learners. In this study, Michigan reading comprehension test, a Reading Self-efficacy Questionnaire and an Internal Control Index were administered to eighty one advance EFL students. The results of Pearson Correlation coefficient, descriptive statistics, and independent t-test indicated that a) there were significant strong positive correlation between self-efficacy beliefs and Locus of Control, between self-efficacy beliefs and reading comprehension , and also between Locus of Control and reading comprehension b) in addition there was a significant difference between internalizers’ and externalizers’ reading comprehension ability. The findings of this study indicate that encouraging students, to improve their self-efficacy and Locus of Control can be quite helpful for them to achieve higher scores in the reading comprehension. Since most researches on Self_efficacy and Locus of Control have been conducted in the field of psychology and little research in this regard has been done in the field of second/foreign language acquisition especially in the context of Iran, the researchers aimed to focus on Self_efficacy and Locus of Control in this study.