Does Learning English Require Grit? Examining the Differential Effects on Grades in Core Subjects

Abstract

Research indicates that beliefs on the locus of the primary source of learning can have negative effects on learning behaviors in school (Mercer & Ryan, 2011). To an increasing extent, young people in Sweden acquire English outside school through different cultural practices (Sundqvist & Sylvén, 2012). At the same time, students lack enthusiasm in English lessons, which can lead to a reduced investment of effort in the language classroom (Henry, 2014). However, learning a language requires both interest and effort. In psychological research, the capacity of showing consistency in interest and perseverance to achieve a goal, such as learning a language, is defined as grit (Duckworth et al., 2007). Studies investigating the association between grit and language achievement remain scarce. The present study contributes to filling this gap by investigating whether the effects of grit differ across different performance domains (i.e., English, Swedish and Mathematics). An additional purpose is to investigate whether there are differential effects of grit for subgroups of students with different SES, achievement levels, and gender. A total of 4646 compulsory school students born in 1992 were extracted from the Evaluation Through Follow-up Database (ETF). Multiple-group path analysis was used to examine the mechanisms of the grit facets (i.e., interest and perseverance) across time and subgroups. While both interest and perseverance predicted grades in Swedish and Mathematics, interest alone predicted grades in English. The low SES high achieving group also showed higher consistency in interest and perseverance than the other groups, indicating that grit could be more valuable in face of adversities.

Validation of L2 grit among Chinese EFL high school students and its enduring effect on achievements: A bifactor model approach

“…This contrasts with the findings that reported a higher predictive power of perseverance of effort than consistency of interest in meta-analyses studies with domain-general grit ( Credé et al, 2017 ; Lam and Zhou, 2019 , 2022 ) and with the finding in domain-specific grit ( Teimouri et al, 2020 ). However, the finding supports the results of Thorsen et al (2021) with domain-general grit and Sudina and Plonsky (2021) with domain-specific grit. This suggests that the relative importance of the two dimensions in L2 achievement may be moderated by other learner internal or contextual variables.…”

“…Thus, it is reasonable to assume that grit – the passion and perseverance for long-term goals–can be an important contributor to motivational behavior and language achievement ( Teimouri et al, 2021 ). However, much recent research that examined grit using a domain-general scale has yielded inconsistent findings ( Yamashita, 2018 ; Robins, 2019, Unpublished doctoral dissertation 1 ; Khajavy, 2021 ; Liu and Wang, 2021 ; Thorsen et al, 2021 ; Khajavy and Aghaee, 2022 ). According to Teimouri and his associates, this may be due to the use of domain-general measure in the domain-specific context of language learning ( Teimouri et al, 2020 , 2021 ).…”

Sticking With It

“…This subject-specificity has only recently been taken into account when measuring Grit or its facets PE or CI. Thorsen et al (2021), for example, assessed CI with subject-specific items (math, foreign language English, native language Swedish), but PE, on the other hand, was operationalized across domains without further justification. Other researchers used math-specific grit items (Yu et al, 2021, Schmidt et al, 2018), Cormier et al (2019).…”