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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Educ.
Sec. Higher Education
Volume 9 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2024.1412746
This article is part of the Research Topic Foreign Language Teaching and Learning in Chinese Higher Education: Emerging Challenges View all 5 articles

Developing A Self-Determination Motivation Scale for English Learners with

Provisionally accepted
  • Jiaying University, Meizhou, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Interest" is one of the most important factors that trigger English learning behavior, and self-determination theory believes that "interest" and "value" are important factors associated with target behavior. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to construct and establish a "Self-Determination Motivation Scale of English Learner" based on the core concept of self-determination theory that is the three innate needs. There were 169 participants who were university students in different majors with Chinese background and taking English class in a university. The research tool is extracted from Learning Climate Questionnaire (LCQ) (6 questions on autonomy), Perceived Competence for Learning (PCS) (4 questions on competence), and Basic Psychological Needs (BPN) in General (8 questions on relatedness) and developed an 18-item questionnaire. The data were obtained by existing three different selfdetermination questionnaires and analyzed by Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA).The results show that after CFA, 15 items of the scale, which extracted from the existing three different self-made questionnaires, were maintained and the removed three items are all reverse items. Also, the reliability the developed 15-item scale is of .95. The conclusion is that the developed 15-item scale is more suitable for university English learners with Chinese background, although the existing three different selfdetermination questionnaires are still valid and reliable. Three suggestions for future research are to add expert validity for item review, adjust the number of reverse items, and have more participants to master scale. The implications, limitations, and future research plans are presented in this paper.

    Keywords: SDT, English learning motivation, scale development, EFL, higher education

    Received: 05 Apr 2024; Accepted: 02 Jul 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Chiang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Juiching Chiang, Jiaying University, Meizhou, China

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