The Interplay between Self-Regulation Strategies, Academic Writing Achievement and Gender in an Iranian L2 Context

Abstract

Research on self-regulation strategies and their impact on EFL learners’ academic writing has turned into an important area in applied linguistics. Accordingly, the present study sought to investigate the relationship between Iranian EFL sophomore students’ self-regulation skills and their academic writing achievement. For this purpose, a self-report questionnaire developed by Pintrich et al. (1991) was utilized to gauge the participants’ level of self-regulation abilities. From the population of sophomore students of English translation, a sample of 195 male and female students with an age range of 18 to 25 agreed to respond to a two-part questionnaire with 81 prompts. Then, based on the 50^th percentile of the ratings obtained, they were divided into four equal samples; namely, High Self-Regulation (HSR) and low self-regulation (LSR) groups. Subsequently, the male and female groups, 25 each, were asked to participate in an academic writing course, which lasted for a full term. At the end of the treatment, an IELTS academic writing test was administered as a post test. The statistical analysis of the data revealed that the male and female groups with a higher level of self-regulation skills outperformed those with a low self-regulation ability rating on the academic writing test. The findings also indicated that of the male and female target samples with high self-regulation ratings, only the former received higher scores on the writing post-test compared with the latter.