Shedding Light on Ecological Critical Language Awareness Construct: A Questionnaire Development and Validation Study in the Iranian EFL Context

Abstract

The study of ecolinguistics to date has been reserved for the field of discourse analysis. However, applying ecolinguistics in pedagogical contexts is a promising way to increase learners’ critical language awareness. To realize this potential, one needs validated measures to quantify learners’ critical language awareness in ecological contexts to conduct research in this field. In the absence of any instrument to measure language learners’ ecological critical language awareness, the researchers of this study developed and validated a questionnaire. An exploratory sequential mixed methods design with two phases was employed. In the exploratory and qualitative phases, the researchers defined the construct and developed a questionnaire based on the underlying factors of the construct. After taking several steps to ensure its content validity, the questionnaire was administered to 200 intermediate-level EFL learners who were selected through convenience sampling. In the quantitative phase, the participants were exposed to ecolinguiscally-informed teaching materials in an English pedagogical context. The collected data were analyzed, and Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA), Cronbach alpha coefficient for reliability indices, and model evaluation estimates were run to ensure the measure’s reliability and validity. EFA substantiated the initial components of the six-factor tentative construct. CFA gave statistical support to the six components as well. All components enjoyed high-reliability estimates. The calculated model-fit estimates verified the CFA model as a valid measure of ecological critical language awareness. The developed measure paves the way for further empirical investigation of ways to raise learners’ ecological critical language awareness in EFL contexts.

Keywords

• construct validation
• critical language awareness
• ecolinguistics
• environmental studies
• questionnaire development