Designing an Intercultural Development Inventory to Assess EFL Learners’ Intercultural Competence: A Mokken Scale Analysis

Subject Areas : آموزش زبان انگلیسی

Mahboubeh Akbari ^{1 *} , Mona Tabatabae Yazdi ²

1 - English Department, Tabaran institute of higher Education, Mashhad, Iran
2 - English Department, Tabaran institute of higher Education, Mashhad, Iran

Received: 2023-10-07 Accepted : 2024-12-08 Published : 2024-05-28

Keywords: EFL learners, intercultural competence, Mokken Scale Analysis, reliability, validation,

Abstract :

While the issue of intercultural competence has received considerable attention in second language learning and teaching over recent decades, the lack of a practical, valid, and dependable instrument to cross-culturally measure intercultural competence is strongly felt. For this reason, the current study aimed at developing and validating an inventory to examine EFL learners’ intercultural competence within the context of Iran. Following a qualitative-quantitative descriptive method research design, an instrument consisting of items adapted from intercultural competence-based survey instruments was generated. Accordingly, the study recruited 200 Iranian EFL learners to fill out the inventory. Furthermore, nine Iranian university professors in Applied Linguistics received an earlier draft of the Intercultural Competence Inventory (ICI) after it was prepared. The experts were requested to provide feedback on the developed Inventory’ content and face validity. After expert/content validation, the construct validity of the inventory was checked using R software running Mokken Scale Analysis. The analyses aimed to determine the structure of the inventory and verify the effectiveness of a five-point Likert response scale. The results concerning item attributes and the quality of the response scale provided confirmation of the scale's internal validity. Hopefully, the presence of this inventory in the Iranian context, characterized by strong internal consistency, internal validity, and construct validity, can contribute valuable insights to the study of intercultural competence among language learners.

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