From Task Motivation to L2 Learning: Understanding Links through Learners' Task Engagement

Abstract This study investigated whether learners' task motivation predicts their task engagement, and whether their task engagement is associated with subsequent L2 learning. Task motivation was operationalized through situated expectancy‐value theory (SEVT; Eccles & Wigfield, 2020), a model of the proximal (i.e., task‐specific) social‐cognitive aspects of individuals' achievement‐related decisions and persistence. Our operationalization of engagement places emphasis on interactional behaviors, with tasks being coded for cognitive, social, emotional and behavioral engagement. In dyads, 106 Vietnamese learners of English performed both an opinion gap task and an information‐gap task in a counterbalanced design. Individually, learners first completed a pre‐test, then briefly previewed the task before reporting their task motivation. In pairs, the learners then performed the task they previewed and reported their task engagement. Finally, learners participated in a paired debriefing interview and then completed a post‐test. Our results showed that in both interactive tasks, learners' task motivation predicted task engagement as measured by self‐reports. However, in these two tasks, task motivation was generally not a significant predictor of engagement as measured by discourse‐analytic indicators, such as the number of words produced, turns taken, instances of responsiveness or semantically engaged talk. Also, task engagement had different associations with learning outcomes, with discourse‐analytic measures of engagement predicting learners' subsequent learning better than self‐reports. These results are discussed regarding (a) the role of task motivation in task engagement, and the link between task engagement and L2 learning and (b) divergences between the self‐reports and the discourse‐analytic measures of task engagement.