Developing a Skills-Based Language Anxiety Instrument: A Study Using Rasch Analysis

This chapter presents the process of developing a quantitative tool that attempts to measure foreign language anxiety from a language skills’ perspective. Part of the rationale for the current chapter stems from the outcomes of Chap. 3 , where the findings of the meta-analysis suggested the necessity of devising an instrument measuring foreign language anxiety in a broader sense, as opposed to using the unidimensional and relatively lengthy tool of the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) (Horwitz in TESOL Quarterly, 20(3):559–562, 1986), which mainly addresses issues related to speaking in a foreign language. While some scholars have developed separate tools for language anxiety associated with various skills by mostly relying on Classical Test Theory (CTT), relatively few papers report on the utilization of Rasch analysis for investigating measurement quality (Apple in JALT Journal, 35, 5–28, 2013; Panayides & Walker in Europe’s Journal of Psychology, 9(3):493–516, 2013; Walker & Panayides in Europe’s Journal of Psychology, 10(4):613–636, 2014; Yamashita in Research methods in applied linguistics, 1(3):Article 100022, 2022) when it comes to the multiple skills perspective of language anxiety. The study reported in this chapter aims to fill this gap.