Impact of Regulatory Focus Orientations on Iranian Intermediate EFL Learners' Fluency and Accuracy in an L2 Oral Task Performance

This study employed 2 theories of motivation (i.e., the regulatory focus and the regulatory fit) to examine how L2 students with different motivational compositions perform L2 oral tasks, especially in terms of accuracy and fluency. The researchers asked 52 intermediate students of a higher education center in Shahrekord (Iran) to partake in an experiment in which they were, first, categorized into 2 groups of either prevention-oriented or promotion-oriented based on their dominant motivational composition. Afterward, the research was conducted in 2 stages: the first one with a conditionally neutral speaking task (regulatory focus) and the second one with 2 conditionally charged speaking tasks, each designed to either induce prevention condition or promotion condition in the mind of the test takers, to see how task condition and motivational orientation of the participants tended to interact (regulatory fit). Results did not reveal any significant causal relationship between the participants' motivational orientation/task condition and their fluency and accuracy. We postulated that the predictions of these 2 theories were not realized because of the interference of extraneous factors such as curriculum design and learning experience.