Career Goals Alone Won’t Make Students Speak English, Vietnamese Study Finds

Wanting a better job is one of the most powerful reasons students give for learning English, yet a striking new study from Vietnam suggests that career ambition by itself rarely translates into actual conversation. Research conducted among undergraduate English majors at four public universities in Southern Vietnam has found that the road from pragmatic, career-focused motivation to genuine English communication behavior runs through two critical psychological waypoints: persistent learning effort and self-efficacy, the personal belief in one’s ability to perform communicative tasks. When those intermediate mechanisms are missing, even the most economically driven students may fall silent, avoiding oral interaction despite understanding exactly how valuable English fluency will be for their futures.

The study, published in Discover Education, employed an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design that combined rigorous quantitative structural modeling with in-depth qualitative interviews. In the quantitative phase, 382 undergraduate English majors completed detailed questionnaires measuring four constructs: instrumental motivation, defined as the drive to learn English for pragmatic outcomes such as career advancement, higher earnings, and social status; learning perseverance, operationalized as language-specific grit or sustained effort despite obstacles; English self-efficacy, focused specifically on spoken communication confidence; and self-reported English communication behavior, the frequency with which students actually initiated conversations, participated in discussions, and used English in face-to-face and digital settings.

Using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling, a variance-based statistical technique well suited to complex mediation structures, the researchers tested a sequential pathway in which instrumental motivation feeds learning perseverance, which in turn builds self-efficacy, which ultimately predicts communication behavior. The model proved remarkably powerful, accounting for 58.9 percent of the variance in self-reported English communication behavior. Every direct path and every specified indirect pathway achieved statistical significance under bootstrapping with 10,000 resamples, providing unusually consistent support for the chained theoretical mechanism grounded in Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory.

The effect size analysis revealed a division of labor within the psychological chain. English self-efficacy emerged as the primary proximal correlate of communication behavior, with a medium effect size of f² = 0.161, meaning that students who believed in their capacity to maintain fluency, contribute spontaneously in discussions, and manage spoken interaction under time constraints reported substantially more frequent communication. Instrumental motivation, by contrast, shared its strongest direct variance with learning perseverance (f² = 0.284), suggesting that career aspirations are most potent not as direct behavioral triggers but as fuel for the gritty, sustained effort that language mastery demands.

The sequential mediation pathway from motivation through perseverance and self-efficacy to behavior was statistically supported, and the combined indirect pathways accounted for nearly 59 percent of the total association between instrumental motivation and communication behavior. In other words, the economic promise of English operates largely behind the scenes, converting into actual speech only after passing through behavioral persistence and cognitive self-belief. Descriptive statistics reinforced this interpretation: instrumental motivation recorded the highest mean score among all constructs, while learning perseverance recorded the lowest, exposing a persistent gap between holding long-term ambitions and maintaining daily effort through grammatical complexity, phonological difficulty, and lexical frustration.

Qualitative interviews with a purposively selected subsample of 30 students, analyzed through reflexive thematic analysis with strong inter-coder agreement, added human texture to these statistical pathways. Participants consistently described career-driven motivation as an adaptive anchor that encouraged proactive practice, but the interviews also surfaced context-specific barriers that coefficients alone cannot capture, most notably the fear of negative evaluation. Several students who reported high survey-based self-efficacy still experienced conversational hesitation during public speaking, while others with strong career motivation but weak baseline confidence simply failed to initiate communication at all. The qualitative data also identified a cautionary phenomenon the researchers describe as unproductive persistence: mechanical rote memorization without interactive practice did little to build genuine speaking self-efficacy.

The study is careful to distinguish communication behavior from willingness to communicate, a construct that dominates much of the second language acquisition literature. Willingness to communicate reflects latent psychological readiness, an intention to speak that may never materialize into action. By measuring the self-reported frequency of completed communication acts, including digital interaction on social platforms as well as classroom and extracurricular oral exchange, the research aligns itself with behavioral frameworks that treat intentions and executions as empirically distinct phenomena requiring separate evaluation. This operational clarity strengthens the theoretical claim that motivational intent undergoes genuine psychological conversion before it surfaces as speech.

Methodologically, the research team implemented extensive safeguards against common method bias, the distortion risk inherent in single-wave self-reported survey designs. Harman’s single-factor test showed the first unrotated factor accounting for only 38.45 percent of total variance, below the conventional 50 percent threshold, and full collinearity assessment produced variance inflation factors well under the conservative limit. Measurement quality was robust across the board, with indicator loadings, composite reliability, convergent validity, and discriminant validity all satisfying stringent benchmarks, and out-of-sample predictive relevance confirmed through a ten-fold cross-validation procedure.

The pedagogical implications are substantial. Because instrumental motivation works indirectly, curricula that merely advertise the economic value of English are unlikely, on their own, to produce more talkative classrooms. Instead, the authors argue for a layered instructional strategy: aligning communicative tasks with authentic workplace contexts to sustain career-relevant engagement; modeling teacher enthusiasm and immediacy to lower anxiety; building supportive, low-stakes environments rooted in emotionally sustainable pedagogy that mitigate fear of negative evaluation; and delivering process-oriented feedback that recognizes effort, thereby helping students accumulate the mastery experiences from which durable self-efficacy grows. Institutions, they suggest, should reframe English as a communicative resource rather than a rigid graduation benchmark, creating informal speaking spaces such as language clubs and peer mentoring networks that decouple practice from formal assessment.

The findings also carry theoretical weight beyond Vietnam. By empirically validating a serialized socio-psychological mechanism in a non-Western, expanding-circle context, the study extends classical second language motivation frameworks and refines human capital models of language learning, which have often implied a more direct link between economic incentive and linguistic outcome. The authors acknowledge the limitations of their cross-sectional design, noting that the data capture covariance patterns rather than proven temporal causation, and they call for longitudinal studies, broader sampling across non-English majors and geographic regions, and future models incorporating teacher-level contextual factors. Still, the central message stands with unusual clarity: for millions of students who see English as their ticket to professional mobility, the decisive variables are not the size of the ambition but the persistence of daily effort and the quiet confidence that grows from it. Extrinsic economic incentives, the study concludes, are associated with genuine communication practice primarily when they are aligned with internal behavioral persistence and cognitive self-belief.

Vietnam offers a particularly instructive setting for this line of inquiry. As an expanding-circle country, where English functions primarily as a foreign language rather than a medium of daily life, learners have few naturalistic opportunities to practice outside structured settings. This makes classroom environments and self-initiated digital interaction disproportionately important channels for communicative development. The Vietnamese government has also elevated English proficiency to a matter of national economic strategy, prompting universities to redesign curricula around oral and professionally oriented competence. Yet, as the study notes, years of formal instruction have not eliminated a persistent gap between curricular goals and students’ actual communicative engagement, a disconnect that motivates examining the psychological machinery linking motive to action.

The sequential pathway validated in the study echoes a core tenet of Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory: mastery experiences are the most powerful source of self-efficacy. In this framing, perseverance is not merely admirable character but the behavioral engine that generates successful task executions. Each sustained attempt at conversation, however imperfect, supplies evidence to the learner that communicative challenges can be managed, which in turn lowers the perceived threat of future interaction. Conversely, students who abandon effort early accumulate few such successes, leaving efficacy beliefs fragile and communication avoidance intact. This helps explain why self-efficacy, rather than motivation itself, emerged as the strongest proximal correlate of reported behavior.

The qualitative emphasis on fear of negative evaluation connects the findings to a broader literature on foreign language anxiety, which has long identified evaluative concerns as a potent inhibitor of oral participation. Anxiety and self-efficacy operate as opposing forces: the former amplifies perceived risk, the latter diminishes it. The observation that some students with strong career motives but weak confidence failed to initiate communication at all illustrates how cognitive self-belief can gate the motivational energy that pragmatic aspirations supply. It also suggests that interventions targeting anxiety reduction, such as low-stakes rehearsal and supportive peer climates, may be prerequisites for motivation to express itself behaviorally.

The researchers’ caution about their cross-sectional design deserves emphasis. Because all variables were measured at a single point in time, the model captures patterns of covariance consistent with the proposed chain rather than demonstrating that perseverance temporally precedes efficacy growth. Longitudinal designs tracking students across semesters could confirm whether mastery experiences accumulate in the manner the theory predicts, and whether unproductive persistence, the rote memorization some interviewees described, eventually gives way to more interactive forms of effort or hardens into a plateau.

For scholars of second language acquisition, the study’s construct clarity may prove as consequential as its structural results. By measuring completed communication acts rather than mere intentions, and by situating the analysis in a non-Western higher education context, the work invites replication across other expanding-circle settings where English carries high economic value but limited everyday presence, testing whether the motivation-to-persistence-to-efficacy chain generalizes beyond Southern Vietnam.

Subject of Research: The sequential psychological pathway linking instrumental motivation, learning perseverance, and self-efficacy to English communication behavior among Vietnamese undergraduates.

Article Title: The relationship between instrumental motivation and English communication behavior through learning perseverance and self efficacy among Vietnamese undergraduates

Article References: Hoang, Q., & Tran, H. A. (2026). The relationship between instrumental motivation and English communication behavior through learning perseverance and self efficacy among Vietnamese undergraduates. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 901. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02142-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02142-0

Keywords: instrumental motivation, English communication behavior, learning perseverance, self-efficacy, Vietnamese undergraduates, PLS-SEM, second language acquisition, language grit, willingness to communicate, mixed methods, higher education, Discover Education