The construct validation and application of a questionnaire of Attribution Theory for Foreign Language Learners (ATFLL)

Attribution theory, as an important theme in psychology, has not been touched by professionals in ELT to date. That English language learners to what issues—intelligence, task difficulty, motivation, perseverance, or something else—attribute their successes and failures differs from culture to culture, having lots of consequences and implications for language teachers and syllabus designers. To our knowledge, up to now nobody has constructed a questionnaire to investigate to what issues English language learners attribute their successes and failures. The major aims of this study were to construct, validate, and apply the questionnaire of attribution theory for foreign language learners in the context of Iran. To construct the questionnaire, a standard procedure was followed including three steps. To validate the questionnaire, Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) was used. Included in this step was a pilot study at two stages. A sample of 627 EFL students at Ferdowsi University was gathered during the pilot study. To apply the validated questionnaire, it was administered to a sample of 442 EFT students majoring in Engineering, Medicine, Psychology, and English so that the researchers could identify the factors to which students in Ferdowsi University attribute their perceived successes and failures with respect to gender and major. For these to determine, Descriptive statistics, Multiple independent T-test and one-way ANOVA were run.