Social relationships and grit in English as a foreign language learning among high school students: A three-wave longitudinal study

Abstract

This study examined the longitudinal reciprocal relations between students’ grit and their perceptions of social relationships (teacher-student and peer relationships) in studying English as a foreign language (EFL). A total of 2,435 students from Grades 10-11 in China (Mage = 16.40 years old, 54.2% female) participated in the study on three occasions across 1 year. The three-wave cross-lagged analytic model results indicated that (a) peer relationship and grit reciprocally enhanced each other across both intervals; (b) the teacher-student relationship at Time 2 was influenced by Time 1 grit, but not vice versa. Nevertheless, the teacher-student relationship transactionally facilitated each other during the second interval (from Time 2 to Time 3). The multiple-group confirmatory factor analysis (MG-CFA) results indicated that such relations remained stable across gender. The study’s findings contribute to ongoing research delineating the dynamic system between social relationships and grit in EFL learning. It also reveals that males and females benefit similarly during social communications with peers and their English language teachers. Implications for educational practices were discussed.

University students' academic grit and academic achievements predicted by subjective well‐being, coping resources, and self‐cultivation characteristics

“…Lam and Zhou (2022) examined the relations between grit and academic achievement based on a meta-analysis of 137 studies and found that the correlations of overall grit level with academic achievement were generally weak to moderate. Empirical studies explored the domainspecific versus general aspects of grit in educational contexts (e.g., Schmidt et al, 2017) which consistently showed that domain-specific grit is a better predictor of achievement than general grit (Cui & Yang, 2022). TA B L E 3 (Continued)…”

An Overview of Empirical Research on Domain-Specific Grit in L2 Learning Contexts

“…The remaining studies drew participants from various countries or regions, including South Korea (N=4), Taiwan (N=4), the United States (N=4), Saudi Arabia (N=4), Turkey (N=3), Hong Kong SAR (N=2), Indonesia (N=2), Japan (N=2), Spain (N=2), Ethiopia (N=1), Iraq (N=1), Kuwait (N=1), Norway (N=1), Poland (N=1), and Russia (N=1). Five studies explored cross-cultural groups, such as the study by Yang et al (2022) [18] which included participants from the Chinese mainland and Iran, and Sudina et al (2021b) [19] which involved 104 ESL learners from Canada, Japan, South Korea, and the United States, as well as 350 EFL learners. In terms of sample sizes, the studies varied significantly, ranging from 30 to 3272 participants.…”

“…In another study, [38] and Cui and Yang (2022) [40] adopted a longitudinal design, allowing for the evaluation of the scale's validity over time. Their results indicated that the fit indices of the measurement models were satisfactory and that the latent factor of L2 grit remained invariant across time.…”

“…In addition, the presence of peer support is also shown to be instrumental in boosting learners' grit levels. For example, Cui and Yang (2022) [40] conducted a year-long study on 2435 Chinese secondary school English learners to investigate the relationship between L2 grit and social interactions. They observed that at Time 1, peer relationships positively predicted grit levels at Time 2, while teacher-student and peer relationships at Time 2 positively predicted grit levels at Time 3.…”

Gender, Ethnicity, Family Socio-Economics, and Grit (A Islamic Higher Education Students Context)

“…They concluded that in mathematics learning, the fortitude of female and male students did not differ significantly (Flanagan & Einarson, 2017). Another opinion states that the level of grit of female and male students does not have a significant difference (bin Shariff et al, 2022;Cui & Yang, 2022;Guo et al, 2023;Hodge et al, 2018). Although females have lower grit than males, the difference is insignificant (Bennett et al, 2021).…”