According to self-determination theory, the need to experience competence is one of a well-recognized trio of basic psychological needs, alongside the need for autonomy and relatedness. Although often assessed at the activity level, the need for competence is met situationally when learners feel able to understand and affect the world around them. In language learning, this means the feeling of success firstly in the comprehension and then in the use of the new language. This situated, contextual sense of competence helps to explain the complex and dynamic development of motivation within the language learner. In this review, we focus on the need for competence as it applies both theoretically and empirically to the study of learning a new language. Building on scholarship showing that competence need satisfaction is a powerful correlate of motivation in education generally, we survey the evidence for competence need satisfaction as a specific predictor of language learning motivation and achievement. We completed comparisons of competence need satisfaction with self-efficacy, self-concept, mindsets, and other ability belief comparisons, and tested a comparative model. The model concluded that the situated sense of competence was the best predictor of achievement, and that this could then be used as a potentially reliable tool for self-assessment.

We additionally tested a model of self-efficacy / competence across language subjects, confirming our previous findings of language transfer between foreign language and Japanese subjects in junior high school. Competence beliefs for English as a foreign language had robust longitudinal effects on Japanese language competence beliefs. Attitudes toward Japanese further predicted achievement in Japanese; the same finding held for English attitudes and achievement. Further, achievement in both subjects did not predict attitudes, indicating a localized year-on-year effect; achievement in each school year is partially informed by achievement in the previous one, but attitudes were influenced by past attitudes, rather than past achievement. This indicates that improving students sense of competence in both language subjects can have long term benefits throughout the schooling and learning system.

The next step in this process will be to see what aspects of achievement have a direct effect on students’ attitudes and competence beliefs. Future studies assessing learners’ attributions and reasons for experiencing difficulty, measuring factors such as significant others, learning focus difficulties, and presentation and media differences are hypothesized to play a localized role in these attributions. These hypothesized will be tested alongside advances in digital games for learning.