EFL Learners’ Goal Orientation, Willingness to Communicate, Listening Anxiety, and Listening Comprehension: A Path Analysis

This study investigated the interrelationship among EFL learners’ goal orientations, willingness to communicate (WTC), listening anxiety, and listening comprehension. Two-hundred participants, selected through convenience sampling procedure from private language institutes, completed the following questionnaires: Goal Orientation Questionnaire section of the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (Pintrich et al., 1991), WTC Questionnaire (Cao Philip, 2006), and Foreign Language Listening Anxiety Scale (Kim, 2000). The listening section of the IELTS exam was also utilized for measuring the participants’ listening comprehension ability. First, a hypothesized model was tested through the AMOS program. The results revealed that all the variables in the study were positively correlated with L2 listening comprehension except for L2 listening anxiety and performance goal orientation, which were negatively correlated with L2 listening comprehension. Moreover, it was found that mastery goal orientation was the strongest predictor of the dependent variable. Then, the revised model for the interrelationship among the variables was presented. The results showed that both psychological and cognitive variables could have crucial roles in EFL learners’ success in learning listening comprehension ability. The implications of the study are discussed in the text.