Promoting Language Learners’ Awareness of Autonomy Through Goal Setting—An Alternative Approach of Assessing Goal Setting Effects

This article aims at proposing a new measurement to assess the effects of language learners’ goal-setting behavior, as an alternative to the traditional open-ended questionnaire. This goal-setting instrument was carefully developed through three phases. In the first phase, an item pool was generated. In the second phase, a pilot study was carried out with a view to modifying the weak points of the questionnaire. In the third phase, a final version of the questionnaire was distributed among participants for evaluating the practicality. The evaluation of the psychometric properties of the final instrument was made using confirmatory factor analyses (CFA), with the validity and reliability being evaluated. The results indicate that the proposed instrument yields satisfactory characteristics and that the theoretical model bears a good fit with the data. The researcher proposes that the instrument presented in this study can provide a more psychometrically sound measure of goal-setting in learning a second language than traditional open-ended questionnaires.