مشخصات پژوهش

Vocabulary knowledge plays a significant role in learning English as a Foreign Language (FL) which lays down the foundations of communicative competence. Expansive vocabulary is crucial to express ideas, comprehend spoken and written discourse, and play a part in communicative situations (Nation, 2001; Schmitt, 2008). There are some factors that influence upon vocabulary knowledge, namely motivation and self-regulation. In line with Dörnyei (2001), motivation is an impetus for a learner to lead and maintain his/her attitude towards pursuit-of-targets. Dörnyei (2005), and Gardner (2010) maintain that, in language acquisition context, motivation is of caliber importance which delineates the extent to which learners get involved in language tasks, amount of their invested effort, and their diligence in tackling with problems. Thus, motivation can aid learners to enhance their communicative competence and facilitate language acquisition, especially vocabulary. The second factor or variable that is studied in this literature is self-regulation which is drawn from educational psychology. As a cardinal variable, self-regulation affects overall development of second language acquisition (Oxford, 2011; Gunning & Oxford, 2014; Ma & Oxford, 2014).