From Self-reflection to Self-actualization towards Academic EFL Students’ Success

Students undergo various stages of difficulty in the process of learning English as a foreign language during the academic years. Researches have been done to find solutions to overcome these progression barriers and look for approaches toward increasing students’ development in education in order to achieve the goal for which the students are instructed. In this article, considerations have been made to find out whether the relationship exits between self-actualized students and their achievements in the field of English learning. Self-actualization is assumed to be the highest need level which can not be gained unless the lower level needs are satisfied according to Maslow pyramid of stages of needs named ‘hierarchy of needs’. Characteristics of self-actualizing people indicate how this feature makes a student prepared enough to confront problematic stages of learning, their tendency to discover and experience are the ideal factors to make a student go deep into the world of knowledge discovery. Their safety and self-esteem which are the lower level needs of hierarchy have been desirably satisfied. Therefore, they feel no fear of the environment they are in and firmly seek to discover more on the basis of their self-belief and autonomy. In conclusion, it is recommended that boosting students’ self-actualization should be teachers’ goal and it could be accomplished by the application of self-reflection and viewing autonomy in learners as teaching ultimate goal.

Keywords:

self-actualization , students , hierarchy of needs , autonomy , self-reflection