Development and Validation of an EFL Self-Regulated Learning Questionnaire

Abstract

Self-regulated learning, strangely enough, though having swept educational psychology's literature like a tidal wave and also, compared to other constructs such as metacognition and learning strategies, has remained rather uncharted in language education literature and L2 research. Hence, among the main purposes of the current study was to form a link, even tenuous, between the two fields by developing a questionnaire in English and Persian to measure self-regulated language learning capacity and behaviour of Iranian EFL learners. The development of the inventory was guided by two pilots (412 participants), content validation by expert judgment, cognitive interviews, expert review of the items, translation quality checks and factorial validation by exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. Drawing on the literature of educational psychology and the results of EFA (exploratory factor analysis), thirteen sub-scales with 41 items were yielded in the study: intrinsic motivation, self-efficacy, locus of control orientation (attribution), attitude, organisation, memory strategies, self-monitoring, self-evaluation, planning and goal setting, concentration and sustained attention, effort regulation, regulation of environment, and help seeking. In addition, some linguistic criteria were used as benchmark to simplify the items. The words comprising the items of the English version of the questionnaire are within the 2 000 most frequent words of the BNC and COCA corpora, which increases the readability of the questionnaire for lower-level language learners. The results show that the inventory enjoys satisfactory psychometric properties and construct validity.