Handwriting Anxiety Scale for Turkish as a Foreign Language Learners: Validity and Reliability

This research aimed to develop a handwriting anxiety scale for students learning Turkish as a foreign language. Validity and reliability analyses were conducted on the scale developed for this purpose. At the beginning of the scale development process, an item pool consisting of 13 items was formed. In the next stage, data were collected with these items from 448 foreign students learning Turkish in the provinces of Istanbul, Erzurum, Sivas and Erzincan. The collected data underwent Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) using a statistical software package. Three items with factor loadings below .45 were removed. Confirmatory Factor Analysis was applied to verify the structure consisting of 10 items, which had 55.06% explained variance in a single factor. As a result of the Confirmatory Factor Analysis, fit index values were found as χ2 / sd = 2.069, SRMR = .03, RMSEA = .69, GFI = .94, AGFI = .90, CFI = .94, NFI = .95, TLI = .96. CR=.92 and AVE=.54 values were reached. In the analyses conducted for the scale's reliability, the Cronbach Alpha coefficient was .91, and with the split-half reliability method, this value was found to be .80 and .87. As a result of the analysis, it was determined that the handwriting anxiety scale for students learning Turkish as a foreign language has a high level of validity and reliability compared to the criteria values given in the literature. Therefore, this scale can be utilized in future research on handwriting anxiety in foreign language learners.