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.
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