Developing and Validating Survey of Attitudes toward Web-Based Autonomous College English Learning

Attitude is one of the important affective factors mediating the SL/FL learning. Scholars, however, are divided as to what categories there are in it. This paper aims to develop and validate a survey of attitudes toward web-based autonomous college English learning (WBACEL). At the stage of pretesting, two teaching methodological experts were invited to have a first evaluation on the wording and format of the survey, and 20 items were suggested to delete. Then it is a small-scale pretesting; three more items without good enough discrimination were dropped out. Finally it is a large-scale pretesting; another ten items proved to be low correlated with the survey were deleted. At the stage of piloting, 283 valid questionnaires (out of total 318 students from nine regular classes) were collected and processed. From the results of item analysis (including item description, item discrimination analysis, and correlation analysis), and the test of construct validity, nine items were deleted. Factor analysis shows that the remaining 28 items can be divided into five attitudinal WBACEL factors: learning valence, resources and learning materials, learning plans and objectives, self-efficacy of learning, and evaluation of learning performance. The items of the whole questionnaire and those of each factor are consistent together with good indexes of Cronbach Alpha coefficient. The findings show a necessity to a reconceptualization of attitudes (in contrast to Gardner’s attitudinal construct in AMTB) in the web-based foreign language learning contexts.