Measuring Singaporean Students’ Motivation and Strategies of Bilingual Learning

Abstract

This paper reports a pilot study on the development and validation of the bilingual (Chinese and English) “Motivation and Attitudes for Language Learning Inventory” (MALLI). MALLI is designed to measure secondary school students’ learning motivations, and several other factors in the learning of both Chinese and English languages. We adapted relevant subscales from “Motivation and Strategies in Learning Questionnaire” and “Chinese Language Classroom Environment Inventory” to create the MALLI (Chinese) and MALLI (English) versions to investigate the factors with reference to Chinese and English learning respectively. Both instruments contain the same set of items with reference to Chinese and English learning correspondingly. After going through initial validation, the instruments were administered to 318 students from various secondary schools in Singapore. Exploratory Factor Analysis resulted in the selection of 33 items from six identified subscales: intrinsic value, extrinsic goal orientation, self-efficacy, study management, teacher support (TS), and ICT for learning (ICT). To demonstrate how the questionnaire can be applied to compare the students’ perceptions related to learning of the two languages, a series of paired t tests was performed on the questionnaire data. It was found that there are significant differences in the students’ perceptions on TS and ICT in the learning of both languages. We discussed the implications of the findings at the end of the paper.