EVALUATION OF THE PSYCHOMETRIC QUALITIES OF THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE CLASSROOM ANXIETY SCALE IN CHINESE TERTIARY EDUCATION

In the context of Chinese tertiary education, measuring students’ foreign language classroom anxiety (FLCA) holds significant importance as it provides insights into the psychological challenges faced by students and sheds light on their language learning experiences. Triangulation of data and methodological procedures were considered in the design of this three-phase study. Specifically, it adopted expert evaluation and item response theory (IRT) to examine validity and reliability, respectively, of the original 33-item FLCA Scale (FLCAS; Horwitz et al., 1986) measuring Chinese college students’ FLCA. Phase One of this study invited 30 experienced college foreign language teachers to rate each FLCAS item’s construct appropriateness and construct equivalence for measuring Chinese college students’ FLCA. Phase Two included follow-up interviews with ten selected Phase One participants about their justifiable comments on items with low construct appropriateness and construct equivalence ratings. Within the IRT framework, Phase Three evaluated the reliability (i.e., item information function) of each FLCAS item based on the data obtained from purposively selected 855 Chinese college students (318 male and 537 female) learning seven foreign languages at three universities in Beijing. The results from Phase One suggested that certain items were identified as having low construct appropriateness and/or poor construct equivalence. Phase Two results indicated that these issues can be attributed to educational, linguistic, and cultural differences between the United States—where the FLCAS was originally developed—and China, as well as to construct irrelevance. Phase Three results further demonstrated that these items exhibited insufficient item information function, suggesting that they make little contribution to the measurement of Chinese college students’ FLCA and should be removed from the original FLCAS. Following the removal of these items, the shortened FLCAS displayed sound psychometric qualities. It is recommended that future researchers and practitioners use this revised FLCAS to measure Chinese college students’ FLCA, and revalidate this shortened FLCAS using samples from diverse regions within China.