Investigating the relationship between locus of control and foreign language performance : a psycholinguistic study

Abstract EN

One of the individual differences is locus of control.

Individuals fall into two types of locus of control.

Individuals with an internal locus of control consider their ability and effort important for achievement, while those with an external locus of control believe that luck, chance, the influence of powerful others, and the difficulty of the task are the main factors which determine success or failure.This study investigates the correlation between locus of control and foreign language performance.

For achieving this purpose, 88 third-year students for the academic year 2016 -2017 in the Department of English, College of Education for Human Sciences, University of Basrah,are selected.

Trice’s Academic Locus of Control Scale (1985)is used as the data collection instrument in this study.Data analysis is done by SPSS software in which the Independent Sample t-test is used as a tool to analyse the research data.The problem of this study is that learners of foreign language differ in many personality traits one of them is locus of control.

In addition, a lot of learners believe that success is a matter of luck and put the blame on teachers or other external factors.

The hypothesis of this study is that there is a relationship between locus of control and foreign language performance.

This relationship could be positive or negative.

The results of the study demonstrate that there is no statistical significant relationship between locus of control and foreign language performance in most of courses