DEVELOPMENT AND VALIDATION OF QUESTIONNAIRE ON L2 MOTIVATION, EPISTEMIC BOREDOM AND EPISTEMIC CURIOSITY

This study aimed to design and test the psychometric properties of a questionnaire assessing L2 motivation, epistemic boredom, and epistemic curiosity of adolescent learners of English in China. While L2 motivation has been extensively researched, the two epistemic emotions, particularly curiosity, remain overlooked in the L2 research literature. This could be due to a lack of appropriate research instruments to conduct such studies. This article describes the steps and stages of the instrument development and validation. The psychometric properties of the questionnaire were tested with a sample of 312 (N=312) Chinese secondary school students. The Cronbach’s alpha values demonstrated that the internal reliability of the three proposed scales was good. The exploratory factor analysis ascertained the underlying structure of the learners’ L2 motivation, epistemic boredom, and epistemic curiosity, evaluating the validity of the constructs. The results revealed six dimensions of L2 motivation, namely, general motivation-attitude, ideal L2 self, ought-to L2 self, instrumental orientation, general motivation-effort, and integrative orientation. The results also uncovered the scale measuring epistemic boredom and epistemic curiosity retained the originally proposed structure. These empirical results indicated that the questionnaire has good psychometric qualities.