This study aimed to develop and validate a scale to measure the Grammatical Carefulness (GC) of foreign language learners. GC, by its definition, refers to psychological, behavioral, and meta-cognitive traits of a learner, and it entails highly controlled, cautious, analytical, and time-consuming language use. By conducting a set of questionnaire surveys targeting Japanese junior high school, high school, and university students (N = 2,288), a Foreign Language Grammatical Carefulness Scale (FLGCS) with 14 items, written in Japanese, was developed and tested for its factorial structure, reliability, convergent, content, and criterion validity. The results demonstrated that FLGCS yields three factors: (a)phonological, (b) lexical-syntactic, and (c) pragmatic carefulness, with a high reliability for each. The factorial validity was also supported by using both xploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. Further, a set of analyses confirmed various types of validity. The evidence for the validity is as follows: (a) the linguistic experts (n = 10) consistently judged that all the items properly referred to each factor in an appropriate linguistic sense, (b) FLGCS showed correlations with learner beliefs, consistent with theoretical expectations, and (c) FLGCS correlated to the scores of a C-test, and with the time to finish the C-test. The applicability of FLGCS in EFL teaching and research will also be discussed.
GC
Validation of the Grammatical Carefulness Scale Using a Discourse Completion Task and a Reading and Underlining Task
The present study attempted to confirm the validity of the Foreign Language Grammatical Carefulness Scale (FLGCS) developed by Kusanagi et al. (2015). According to Kusanagi et al. (2015), Grammatical Carefulness (GC) is defined as a personal trait reflecting learners’ behavioral and psychological aspects of language use, and it consists of three subscales: phonological carefulness, lexical-syntactic carefulness, and pragmatic carefulness. Although the initial validation concerning factorial, content, and criterion-based validity has been done, the criterion-based validation did not take into account the correlation between the performance focusing on the specific aspects of language use and each subscale under the GCS. In order to examine the validity of the subscales of GCS, this study applied two types of task: a discourse completion task (DCT) and a reading and underlining task (RUT), which are considered to measure pragmatic and lexical-syntactic aspects of learners’ performance respectively. It was found that the two subscales (lexical-syntactic and pragmatic) and the scores of the two tasks were weakly correlated, which means that this study found additional evidence showing the validity of FLGCS.
Yu Tamura 