The Development and Validation of the English Writing Enjoyment Scale

Abstract

To develop the English Writing Enjoyment Scale, I surveyed 30 Chinese-as-First-Language university students of English (Group 1) through a self-narrative inquiry that included but was not limited to psychological, motivational, behavioral, cognitive, and physiological factors. Using a grounded theory approach to analyzing the participants’ self-reports, I extracted 30 thematic categories. From the 11 categories that were most often endorsed, I developed the English Writing Enjoyment Scale and subjected it next to other psychometric analyses using three other groups of larger samples of university students. This included first a Principal Components Analysis (Group 2: n = 220) and then a Confirmatory Factor Analysis (Group 3: n = 357) that narrowed the instrument to 9-items with satisfactory internal reliability and construct validity. Finally, I conducted correlational analyses between this instrument and four other measures in and outside second language acquisition research (Group 4: n = 62). I discuss these findings and their implications and outline directions for further research.