The Impact of Motivation, Learning Strategies, and Personality Trait on Medical Students’ Procrastination in English Courses

Procrastination focuses on a voluntary postponement of a task despite the awareness of its detrimental effects. Different variables impact the academic procrastination of the students in learning a language. Awareness of the effective factors can speed up the learning process and decrease procrastination This study investigated the impact of motivation, language learning strategies, personality traits, and some demographic variables including gender, the field of study, English course, instructor, and education level on students' procrastination. This study is a quantitative-survey type and data collected through administering questionnaires from all available 238 medical students at Shiraz University of Medical Sciences studying at least one English course in the second semester, 2016. The researchers administered a demographic questionnaire, Attitude/Motivation Test Battery, Language Learning Strategies Questionnaire, and Eysenck Personality Inventory to collect data. The collected data were analyzed through the Statistical Package for Social Sciences. weak correlation was found between procrastination and compensation strategy and instrumental motivation; however, procrastination significantly correlated only with instrumental motivation although the effect of instrumental motivation on procrastination was not considerable. Furthermore, the students were found to be medium strategy users and high procrastinators. Since the variables in the study were not found to influence students’ procrastination effectively, more research is required to explore other variables which may affect students’ high level of procrastination. Moreover, as the learning strategies are very effective in promoting learning, the instructors and curriculum designers are recommended to include these strategies in teaching materials and encourage the students to use them more frequently.