THE GOAL SETTING COMPONENTS: A STUDY OF SERBIAN EFL LEARNERS

Abstract

The goal setting theory came into existence almost three decades ago (Locke & Latham 1990). However, goal setting in Serbian EFL students has not been investigated so far. The aim of this paper is to characterize the act of goal setting of Serbian learners and provide a comparison with the results of other EFL learners. The analysis of the questionnaire based on one presented in Gaumer Erickson, Soukup, Noonan & McGurn (2015), which was completed by 100 students, suggests that B1 students possess better values of the goal setting components than B2 students. Correlations between the components provide a large number of statistically significant results. What the goal setting theory implies is that students who are more successful in goal setting will achieve better results. Nevertheless, such an idea is not confirmed by our results since success in learning does not correlate with any of the goals setting components.