The Relationship between Motivation and Self-assessment of Writing Ability: A Case of Iranian EFL Learners

This study was conducted to investigate the relationship between motivation and Iranian EFL learners‟ self-assessment of writing. The preliminary participants of the study were 68 MAstudents of TEFL at Azad University of Gorgan, Iran. To homogenize the participants, TheCambridge Proficiency Test was administered and 54 students were selected. Then, students took a motivation test. Next, all the students were given a topic to write an essay.Theparticipants were M.A students and they had learned all important parts of essay including thesis statement,body paragraphs, conclusion, outlining, and coherence. In addition, theywere asked to read their own writing and give a mark based on Writing Scoring Rubricmodified from Wang and Liao (2008). In order to avoid subjective rating and ensure the intra- rater reliability of the assessment, these writing samples were marked twice based onthe same scale that the students utilized in self-assessment. To analyze the obtained data,Pearson Correlation and one way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) were used as statistical procedures. The results revealed that there was not statistically significant relationshipbetween motivation and students‟ self-assessment. Moreover, the relationship between selfassessmentand teacher‟s rating of students‟ writing ability was statistically significant. The findings have some implications for language teaching and assessment

Keywords:

motivation , assessment , essay writing , and self-assessment