Abstract
This study had two aims: to attempt to verify the construct validity of the measure of international posture—which refers to attitudes toward the international community—in foreign language education and to explore how international posture structurally relates to personality traits. A total of 163 Japanese undergraduate students participated in the study. To examine the first aim, exploratory factor analysis was conducted, followed by confirmatory factor analysis. Results of the exploratory factor analysis showed that three latent constructs were extracted from 23 items of the measure. Next, confirmatory factor analysis confirmed the constructs with the fit indices except the chi-square score. To investigate the second aim, structural equation modeling was used. It showed that two personality traits—openness to experience and extraversion—were strongly associated with international posture. Furthermore, our study indicated a second-order configuration structured in the verified measure in relation to the two personality traits.
Highlights
International posture (IP) is the concept advanced by Yashima (2002, 2009) in an English-as-a-foreign-language context based on Gardner’s influential construct of integrativeness
For exploratory factor analysis (EFA), principal factor analysis was conducted with Promax rotation to extract latent factors of the IP measures for all four subscales based on the 163 responses to the questionnaire
In the intergroup approach-avoidance tendency (IAT) subscale, for example, “I want to participate in a volunteer activity to help foreigners living in the neighboring community” (IAT5) and “I would feel somewhat uncomfortable if a foreigner moved in door” (IAT6) had low loadings; in other words, these items had a weak relationship with this subconstruct
Summary
International posture (IP) is the concept advanced by Yashima (2002, 2009) in an English-as-a-foreign-language context based on Gardner’s influential construct of integrativeness. Yashima (2002) initially proposed five subscales, including the component of ethnocentrism as a subconstruct, when analyzing her second language (L2) communication model. The IP measurement model developed by Yashima (2002, 2009) was originally derived from studies of intercultural communication and social psychology. She dropped ethnocentrism because of the weak results of its statistical tests. The study of Elwood and Monoi (2015) demonstrated a different factor structure of the IP measurement model in elementary students of different academic years. Our study applied exploratory as well as confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to investigate the convergent and discriminant validity of the measure
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