The Relationship between Secondary School Students’ Identity Construction and their Declared Achievements in Learning English as a Foreign Language

Abstract

New developments in the field of second language acquisition emphasized the central importance of identity issue in foreign language learning. With Taylor’s hypothesis in which she claimed that the components and type of learners’ identities will correlate strongly with their declared achievements in the target language at any point in time and over the period of the students’ secondary education, the present research study attempts to investigate the relationship between secondary school students’ identity construction and their declared achievements in learning English as a foreign language. The study followed a cross-sectional methodology in the exploration of the progress in the adolescence learners’ identity perceptions and achievement in English classes. To this end, the data are collected by dint of an English and Arabic version of the same questionnaire administered to sixty students, twenty from each class of first, second, and third year of Terkhouche Ahmed secondary school of Jijel. The findings of the research revealed that the students’ identity perception is strongly related to their declared academic achievement in learning English. Moreover, the more students feel that their private selves are appreciated the more they will be successful in learning English. The analyses of the research findings consistently evidenced the above mentioned hypothesis. Based on the results obtained, pedagogical implications and recommendations for further research are suggested