Author Profile
Dr. Sha Luo is an Associate Professor at the College of International Studies, Shenzhen University, and serves as Deputy Director of the Language Testing and Assessment Center at the university. She has led five provincial-level research projects funded by the Guangdong Philosophy and Social Science Foundation, the Guangdong Educational Research Program, and the Guangdong Educational Planning Project, and has participated in a National Social Science Fund project. As first author, she has published extensively in SSCI and CSSCI journals, including System, Language Teaching Research, and Studies in Second Language Learning. Her textbook Communicative English Writing was published by Tsinghua University Press. She leads the national first-class online course "Communicative English Writing." Her research interests include language learning motivation, motivational regulation, social support in language teaching, and technology-enhanced language teaching.
1. Research Highlights
Recently, Prof. Sha Luo, in collaboration with Professor Zhengdong Gan from the University of Macau and Dr. Zhujun An from the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, published a study titled “Validating a measure of motivational regulation strategies and examining their relationship to English proficiency” in the international SSCI-indexed journal Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching (Volume 16, 2026). This study validates the Motivational Regulation Strategies in EFL Learning Scale (MRS-EFL) for Chinese English learners and examines the associations between different motivational regulation strategies and students’ English proficiency.
2. Research Background
In the learning process, students frequently experience motivational fluctuations when tasks are boring, overly difficult, or perceived as lacking value. How to effectively sustain motivation and maintain learning effort in the face of difficulties is a core issue in self-regulated learning. In foreign language learning, particularly in English as a foreign language (EFL) contexts, learners’ ability to consciously use strategies to maintain and enhance motivation is crucial to their ultimate language development. However, the field currently lacks a rigorously validated instrument which is specifically designed to measure motivational regulation strategies among Chinese EFL learners.
3. Research Design
To address this gap, this research adapted the Motivational Regulation Questionnaire (MRQ) developed by Schwinger and colleagues (2007, 2009), and validated the MRS-EFL scale. The scale comprises 30 items covering eight strategies: enhancement of situational interest, enhancement of personal significance, mastery self-talk, performance-approach self-talk, performance-avoidance self-talk, environmental control, self-consequating, and proximal goal setting.
A sample of 587 first-year Chinese college students enrolled in a university English enhancement course participated in the study. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to examine the factor structure, and multi-group analysis was conducted to test measurement invariance across gender. Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was then employed to examine differences in strategy use among students with varying English proficiency levels (classified as high, medium, and low based on an English placement test).
4. Research Findings
The results confirmed the eight-factor structure of the MRS-EFL, demonstrating good construct validity, convergent validity, discriminant validity, and gender invariance. This suggests that the scale is a reliable and valid tool for measuring motivational regulation strategies among Chinese EFL learners.
Regarding the relationship between strategy use and English proficiency, the study found that high-proficiency students scored significantly higher than medium- and low-proficiency students on most motivational regulation strategies, particularly on enhancement of situational interest, enhancement of personal significance, mastery self-talk, and proximal goal setting. In addition, high-proficiency students were more adept at actively managing and sustaining their motivation by connecting learning content to personal interests and life, creating engaging learning situations, emphasizing self-growth and competence development, and breaking down larger goals into manageable sub-steps.
5. Pedagogical Implications
This study provides both a practical tool in measuring motivational regulation strategies and empirical evidence for the importance of sustaining learner motivation in foreign language teaching, with the following implications:
First, teachers should recognize that how students maintain motivation is as important as why they learn. Strategies such as goal-setting and interest enhancement can be explicitly taught to help students build their own “motivational toolkit.”
Second, given the differences in strategy use across proficiency levels, teachers can offer more guided support for medium- and low-proficiency students, for example, through reflective logs or study plans, to raise their awareness and habitual use of relevant strategies.
Third, the MRS-EFL can serve as a diagnostic tool to help teachers understand students’ overall motivational regulation profiles and identify areas of weakness. This enables more targeted instructional interventions, particularly in stratified teaching contexts.
Fourth, as high-proficiency students tend to prefer strategies related to intrinsic motivation such as interest enhancement, teachers can reduce over-reliance on external rewards and instead create learning environments that support autonomy, competence, and relatedness to stimulate learners’ intrinsic motivation.
6. Conclusion
The MRS-EFL validated in this study offers a reliable instrument for understanding the dynamic regulation of foreign language learning motivation. The findings indicate that high-proficiency students use motivational regulation strategies more frequently than their medium- and low-proficiency peers, especially strategies related to interest. This highlights the need for tiered and personalized motivational support for students at different proficiency levels. Meanwhile, English language instruction should guide learners in mastering motivational regulation strategies, cultivating their ability to self-motivate and sustain effort, thereby promoting more autonomous and enduring learning behaviors.
For more details, please access the full paper: https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.38771
