In recent years, a growing volume of research has consistently shown the positive impacts of goal setting in the language classroom. However, there is a lack of research on the relationship between goal setting and EFL students' writing competence and their linguistic development. The present study aims to address this gap. Thirty-nine Vietnamese university students were taught to write argumentative IELTS essays and practice setting writing goals over the course of ten weeks. It was found that students' writing competence significantly improved after the treatment. In terms of linguistic development, students used more advanced vocabulary and n-grams with higher mutual information. However, lexical diversity did not improve. For syntactic complexity, students tended to write shorter sentences, shorter clauses, and shorter T-units, with a reduction of coordination, subordination, and verb phrases. Instead, they tended to use more noun and preposition phrases. Regarding writing fluency, no significant change was seen in text length. However, there was a significant increase in the number of participants who were able to satisfy the word requirement of argumentative IELTS essays. The questionnaire data also revealed that students believed that it was unnecessary to increase the difficulty of their writing goals, and that students were less committed to their writing goals. The correlations showed that among the four goal factors, goal commitment showed the strongest correlation with students' perspectives toward the effectiveness of goal setting over time. Because there was no control group, the findings were confirmed in interviews with nine participants. Pedagogical and theoretical implications will also be discussed in the study.
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