Self-regulated learning in ESL/EFL contexts: a methodological exploration

REVIEW ARTICLE https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03617-x OPEN Self-regulated learning in ESL/EFL contexts: a methodological exploration 1234567890():,; Omid Mazandarani1 ✉ The present systematic review provides an overview and analysis of methodological underpinnings of self-regulated learning (SRL) research in ESL/EFL contexts. A search of five academic databases was conducted for studies published from 2017 to 2022. Adopting Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines, the search yielded 31 studies conducted in various countries and educational settings. Informed by a 16-item coding scheme, the analysis found that SRL research is more nested within higher education. The results provided evidence to substantiate the idea that quantitative approaches towards SRL research is in the ascendency. Experimental and survey designs were identified as the most preferred research designs. The results revealed an absolute dominance of questionnaire/scale as the most frequently utilised data collection instrument. As for data analysis software, SPSS and Mplus were applied in the majority of studies. The results demonstrated that correlation, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), and structural equation modelling (SEM) were among the most widely applied statistical tests. Finally, writing, compared to other language skills/subskills, was found to receive a surge of interest in SRL research. The study concludes with some suggestions for further future research. W Introduction ith the global popularisation of English medium instruction in higher education institutions in non-English-speaking countries around the world, researchers have inevitably been drawn to the significance of maximising students’ learning opportunities in English as a second or foreign language (ESL/EFL) contexts. To this end, identifying variables which may help promote learning outcomes has turned out to become a sine qua non for theory, policy, and practice, exerting influence on students’ learning experience (Ardasheva et al., 2017, p. 544). Indeed, a wide array of factors and variables conducive to learners’ learning experiences has been reported and documented in the literature, namely mode of instructional delivery such as blended learning (e.g., Bouilheres et al., 2020), gamification (e.g., Kian Tan et al., 2023), virtual and augmented reality (e.g., Jiawei et al., 2024; Videnovik et al., 2020), flipped classroom (e.g., Sointu et al., 2023), classroom climate (e.g., Li et al., 2023), artificial intelligence (AI) (e.g., Díaz and Nussbaum, 2024), instructional quality and student satisfaction (e.g., Yang et al., 2023) to name but a few. 1 Department of English Language Teaching, Aliabad Katoul Branch, Islamic Azad University, Aliabad Katoul, Iran. ✉email: HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES COMMUNICATIONS | (2024)11:1118 | https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03617-x 1 REVIEW ARTICLE HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES COMMUNICATIONS | https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03617-x In a similar vein, one variable, amongst others, which has long been considered to serve as an element in students’ success tends to be self-regulated learning (e.g., Zimmerman, 1990, p. 4). As a “desirable educational outcome” (Paris and Newman, 1990, p. 87), encompassing a good few number of variables influential in learning (Panadero, 2017, p. 1), self-regulated learning has been evidenced as a precious asset to students. The surge of interest in self-regulated learning research over the past decades has culminated in the emergence of several models (e.g., Boekaerts, 2017; Winne and Hadwin, 1998; Zimmerman, 1989), each of which has been the focus of several review studies (e.g., Panadero, 2017; Puustinen and Pulkkinen, 2001). Nevertheless, since coming to its own in the 1980s, selfregulated learning research has mostly been around in the fields of mainstream general education and educational psychology. Only later, did the notion gain momentum in ESL/EFL contexts especially over the last decade (e.g., Bai and Wang, 2023; Kondo et al., 2012). Given that contextual constraints tend to thwart and exert impact on efforts at regulation (Pintrich, 2004, p. 387), then, examining how self-regulated learning strategies and models transpire and manifest themselves in ESL/EFL contexts, where the medium of instruction is different from students’ mother tongue, imbued with idiosyncratic subtleties (Mazandarani and Troudi, 2022), is seemingly of great importance. Despite all the endeavours made so far, drawing solid conclusions as to how selfregulated learning tends to interact with diverse educational variables and covariates (e.g., different types of language skills, subskills, and components, level of education, gender, age, level of proficiency) remains rather enigmatic in language teaching contexts. As such, several researchers have referred to instances of inconsistent findings, leaving lacunae in the SRL literature (see e.g., Chen, 2022; Guo et al., 2023; Shen and Bai, 2022). For instance, in their study on self-regulated learning strategies in a flipped course, Öztürk and Çakıroğlu (2021, p. 1) found that whereas students’ speaking, reading, writing, and grammar performances benefited significantly from SRL, their listening performance was not of any significant difference. This predicament could be partly due to the fact that research into the dynamics and mechanism of self-regulated learning in ESL/EFL contexts, compared to mainstream general education, appears to be in its infancy, especially when it comes to understanding the paradigmatic underpinnings of SRL research. In the current educational research milieu in which, as Pring (2000a) eloquently contends, there is a bulk of “bad research” (p. 5), gaining deep insights into how to design, collect, analyse, and interpret accurate data, and draw robust conclusions is of high significance. As a prized asset to researchers (Mazandarani, 2022a, p. 217), awareness of paradigmatic nature of what is to be researched is quite seminal on the very grounds that rigourous findings in a research project tend to be contingent upon solid ontological, epistemological, and methodological assumptions, which per se lay the groundwork for selection of appropriate methods and instruments. Yet, research has shown that rarely do researchers make the underlying philosophical assumptions explicit in their works (Mazandarani, 2022a). On such grounds, therefore, one recommended course of action for enabling researchers to make sense of the past, present, and future directions of what they research into is to appreciate the importance of methodological approaches of their research topics. One way for doing so lies with conducting meta-analyses and systematic review studies. Whilst the literature on different dimensions of SRL in mainstream education hosts various meta-analysis and systematic review studies, offering rich perceptive (e.g., Broadbent and Poon, 2015; Dignath et al., 2 (...truncated)