The impact of language learning strategies and motivation on L2 writers’ lexical accuracy in response to WCF

Abstract

The role individual differences play in developing learners’ L2 has received sufficient attention, but only few studies have addressed the relationship between these differences and learners’ lexical development. Accordingly, this study investigates the influence of two learner differences, namely language learning strategies (LLS) and motivation on reducing 63 L2 learners’ lexical errors revised in response to coded teacher feedback. Data was collected from a pretest essay and a survey about students’ motivation to learn. Students received training sessions on how to apply LLS to revise lexical errors in response to coded teacher feedback and filled in a questionnaire about the strategies they used for error correction. After training, students wrote an immediate and delayed post-test essays which were used to monitor any development in their lexical performance. Analysis of students’ errors on the three testing sessions revealed that LLS significantly reduced “connotation”, “unnecessary”, informal, and “general” word errors at different post-tests. Moreover, different factors (feedback method, revision techniques, and sources of revision) influenced students’ lexical error revision. Finally, motivation subscales and total scores showed significant associations with the different types of lexical errors at the pretest; however, at the post-test, a higher total score was significantly associated with lower frequency of “collocation” errors.