Adopting a social-cognitive perspective, this study aims to explore the relationships among reading motivations, strategy use, literacy performance, and causal attributions in a second/foreign language (L2/FL) context. These relationships, especially as they concern L2/FL readers in secondary education, remain infrequently examined. Three hundred and ninety-six Taiwanese high-school students, including 208 boys and 188 girls, participated in the study. The instruments used included three questionnaires presented in Mandarin Chinese (the participants' first language), as well as an English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) literacy test. The questionnaires measured L2 learners' intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, rates of strategy use, and causal attributions, respectively. The EFL test assessed the participants' knowledge of words, phrases, and sentence structures, as well as their ability to understand English passages. The structural equation modeling (SEM) was performed to examine the relations between those factors. The results showed positive and significant relationships among the factors examined. Reading motivations had a direct effect on strategy use, as did strategy use on L2 performance. Equally important, L2 performance also had a significant direct effect on causal attributions, which, in turn, had a significant effect on reading motivations. The findings support the contention that reading comprehension involves a coordination of motivational processes with cognitive and metacognitive operations [1, 2].
