Course Grades, Not Confidence, Track Burnout in Saudi English Learners

First-year university students in Saudi Arabia who performed better in their compulsory English course reported noticeably lower levels of foreign language learning burnout, according to a cross-sectional study of 517 undergraduates published in BMC Psychology. The study also found that English self-efficacy, the belief in one’s own ability to learn and use the language, was associated with lower burnout at first glance, but that this association shrank dramatically once course performance and students’ self-rated English proficiency were taken into account. Only one narrow link survived the full analysis, and it concerned a burnout dimension that itself measures perceived competence.

The researchers measured burnout with an Arabic version of the Maslach Burnout Inventory adapted for English-as-a-foreign-language students, which captures three dimensions: exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced efficacy. Self-efficacy was assessed with an Arabic version of the Questionnaire of Self-Efficacy in Learning a Foreign Language. Unlike most prior work in this area, the team did not rely solely on questionnaire totals. Coursework attainment was drawn from official course records rather than self-report, and students also rated their own English proficiency. Confirmatory factor analyses served as measurement checks before the main analyses, gender and first-year track differences were tested with Welch tests, and the core questions were addressed with zero-order correlations followed by four-block hierarchical regression models.

On average, burnout scores fell below the scale midpoint, while English self-efficacy sat close to it, suggesting that this population was not broadly burned out. Gender differences were negligible, and differences across first-year tracks were limited, with one exception: Health Sciences students reported higher English self-efficacy than students in the other three tracks. At the zero-order level, higher coursework attainment, higher self-rated proficiency, and higher English self-efficacy were each associated with lower total burnout. Coursework attainment in particular showed strong negative associations with all three burnout dimensions, and it was closely related to self-rated proficiency, with a correlation coefficient of 0.863, indicating that grades and self-assessed ability were capturing substantially overlapping information.

The hierarchical regression models told a more restrained story. After coursework attainment and self-rated proficiency were considered, a clear additional association for English self-efficacy emerged only for the Reduced Efficacy dimension of burnout, accounting for an increment of 2.38 percent in explained variance, with a standardized coefficient of −0.218 and a 95 percent confidence interval from −0.314 to −0.121. The authors caution that this dimension concerns perceived effectiveness and shares some competence content with self-efficacy itself, so the surviving link may partly reflect conceptual overlap between the two measures rather than a distinct psychological effect.

The study’s conclusions are deliberately limited. Because the data are cross-sectional, the design cannot establish direction, and the close relationship between coursework attainment and self-rated proficiency prevents firm conclusions about the relative importance of grades versus self-assessed ability. The authors therefore interpret the remaining self-efficacy association as a limited residual association rather than evidence of a broad relationship between self-efficacy and burnout. For foreign language education research, the message is methodological as much as substantive: relations that look robust when total questionnaire scores are analyzed can narrow considerably once objective course performance and self-rated proficiency are brought into the model.

Subject of Research: Foreign language learning burnout and English self-efficacy among first-year Saudi university EFL students

Article Title: Foreign language learning burnout and English self-efficacy among first-year Saudi university EFL students: course performance and self-rated English proficiency

Article References: Altalib, A. (2026). Foreign language learning burnout and English self-efficacy among first-year Saudi university EFL students: course performance and self-rated English proficiency. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05850-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05850-2

Keywords: foreign language burnout, English self-efficacy, EFL students, Saudi Arabia, higher education, Maslach Burnout Inventory, hierarchical regression, coursework attainment, self-rated proficiency, BMC Psychology, Foreign, language