Exploring the Dynamic Interplay Between Intrinsic Value, Perceived Costs, and Language Achievement: A Cross-Lagged...

Research on language learning often explores the positive sides of task values and their link to language skills. However, the negative aspect (i.e., perceived costs) has been largely overlooked, despite its potential impact on academic behavior and outcomes. This study clarifies the temporal interplay among intrinsic value, perceived costs (effort/emotional cost and opportunity cost), and language achievement across three school years, with a particular focus on gender differences. Data were collected from a cohort of 314 Taiwanese adolescents (169 male, 145 female) across seven secondary schools. The cross-lagged panel model was estimated in R using the lavaan package. First, the results showed that the stability of English achievement was strong (T1 → T5 β = .70, p < .001), accounting for the great majority of the longitudinal variance in the distal outcome. In addition, only former intrinsic value retained a small but reliable unique effect on latter achievement (β = .13, p < .05). Second, intrinsic value consistently and negatively predicted subsequent effort/emotional cost over time, whereas the reverse path was weak and inconsistent. Third, multi-group analysis revealed that only intrinsic value uniquely predicted latter achievement for female students (β = .22, p < .01), whereas among male students, only effort/emotional cost did (β = -.21, p < .05). The findings suggest that motivation-achievement relations should be interpreted as co-developmental rather than unidirectional, and that interventions to support language achievement should be tailored to the gender-specific motivational pathway most at risk.