ABSTRACT

Religious orientation has been studied in relation to a host of variables such as motivation (Barrett, Patock-Peckham, Hutchinson, & Nagoshi, 2005), prejudices (Duck & Hunsberger, 1999), psychological distress (Salsman, & Carlson, 2005), sexual orientation (Haldeman, 2004) and spirituality (Baetz, Griffin, Bowen, & Marcoux, 2004). Its role has not, however, been investigated in relation to school achievement in countries such as Iran whose government is religious. This study fills the gap by employing a 44-item religious orientation scale developed by Khodadady and Bagheri (2014) and validated with grade four senior high school students by Dastgahian and Khodadady (2015). The administration of the scale to 440 students and correlating it with their scores on their final English language examination showed that religious orientation correlates significantly but inversely proportional with English achievement. Similarly, the inspirational, social and sacrificial genera constituting religious orientation revealed significant but negative relationships with the achievement. Charitable and inquisitive genera, nonetheless, related positively to learning English in secondary education. These findings indicate that the domain and genera of religious orientation relate more significantly to learners’ school achievement at secondary education than other domains such as personality, spiritual intelligence and teacher effectiveness do. The religious domain and its genera must, therefore, be employed in educational programmes and explored academically to enhance English language achievement at secondary education.