Building a foreign language anxiety scale for non-native speakers and verifying its psychometric characteristics

Abstract

This study aimed to build a scale that measures foreign language anxiety among non-native speakers, and to study its psychometric properties. To achieve this goal, the theoretical literature, previous studies, and measures related to language anxiety were reviewed, and the main dimensions of the scale were identified, namely: communication anxiety, social anxiety, negative assessment anxiety, performance anxiety, test anxiety, and learning anxiety. Based on this, a preliminary image of the scale was developed consisting of 43 items distributed over these six dimensions. Based on the opinions of the judges and the initial experimentation of the scale, the final version of the scale was reached, consisting of 40 items distributed over these six dimensions. After that, the final scale was applied to 396 students randomly selected from the student community enrolled in Arabic as a foreign language teaching centers at Yarmouk University and the University of Jordan during the second semester of the academic year 2022/2023. The results showed the achievement of the indications of logical validity, and the construct validity through exploratory factor analysis, where four main dimensions appeared on which the items were loaded, namely: social anxiety, test anxiety, negative evaluation anxiety, and communicative anxiety.  The internal correlations matrix between the dimensions also showed a solid factor structure for the scale, the highest of which was the correlation coefficient between the social anxiety dimension and the test anxiety dimension being 0.93. The significance of the stability of the scale was also verified by the Cronbach-alpha method, which expressed the internal consistency  of the dimensions of the scale, and the scale as a whole, and its value was 0.92, and the value of the stability coefficient of the split-half of the scale was 0.93, while the standard error in measurement for the scale was 8.92, which is a good indicator of the stability of the scale.