Adult Foreign Language Learners' Goals for a Writing Task
The present study examined the goals that 103 adult Japanese learners of English as a foreign language set for a specific writing task, asking participants to report their goals for the task before they engaged in it. The importance of goal setting has been recognized in the field of educational psychology (Zimmerman, 2008) and second language motivation and writing research (Cumming, 2006d; Cumming, Busch, Zhou, 2002; Dornyei, 2001c) In the current study students set rhetoric and linguistic goals for a writing task most. Previous instructions and a prompt of composition influenced students' goals for a subsequent writing task.