Development and validation of Foreign Language Teacher Support Scale (FLTSS)

Abstract

Teacher support, as an essential type of social support and an important antecedent of many key outcomes in L2 learning, can significantly contribute to foreign language achievement. Although teacher support has received considerable attention in education and educational psychology, it has drawn scanty attention in foreign language and applied linguistics research. Therefore, the present study aimed to fill in this research gap by developing and validating a domain-specific scale to measure the types of teacher support perceived by English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. An initial item pool was constructed based on some generic measures of teacher support and semi-structured interviews with EFL learners. Then, the items were submitted to a panel of experts and their content validity was checked using the content validity index. After a series of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, the final version of the Foreign Language Teacher Support Scale (FLTSS) measuring four types of perceived teacher support, namely, emotional, instrumental, appraisal, and informational, was prepared. The results of examining different types of validity and reliability indicated that the scale is suitable for measuring different types of perceived teacher support. Some suggestions for further research are presented.