The development and validation of an intercultural competence evaluation instrument for upper secondary foreign language teaching

Abstract

Intercultural competence is a crucial element of foreign language education, yet the multifaceted nature of this construct makes it inherently difficult to assess. Although several tools for evaluating intercultural competence currently exist, research on their use in secondary school settings is scarce. This study reports on the development and validation of an instrument intended specifically for use in foreign language literature education. To this end, tangible learning objectives for intercultural literary competence were developed based on five dimensions of intercultural communicative competence (Byram, 1997) and six categories of literary competence (Witte, 2008). These objectives were re-formulated for implementation in a student questionnaire. Using exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, the construct validity of the instrument was investigated among a sample of 164 secondary school students in the upper forms (aged 16-19) of pre-university education in the Netherlands. Although the results supported the hypothesized two second-order factor structure, the model fit indices were less favourable compared to the fit indices of an alternative five first-order factor model. Subsequently, correlation and summability analyses were performed to test the reliability of the instrument. Future research and implications are discussed.