Developing a Scale to Measure Syrian Students' Attitude Towards Turkish (SSATT) and Examining Its Psychometric Properties

Abstract

The aim of the present study was to develop a valid and reliable measurement tool for identifying the attitudes towards Turkish of Syrian university students learning Turkish as a foreign language. The study group was comprised of a total of 489 individuals with 285 for exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and 204 for confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Student opinions, relevant literature and expert opinions were utilized when developing the scale items thus putting forth a 53 item form. Eight items were excluded following the pilot application on first form for linguistic clarity thus conducting EFA with 45 items. A total of 20 items were excluded as a result of the EFA thus obtaining a 25 item, three factor form that explains 49.42 % of the variance. CFA was conducted with a new study group for examining the model fit of the obtained three factor structure and the results of CFA (X2/sd= 2,46; RMSEA= .085; CFI= .92; NNFI= .91; SRMR= .085; GFI: .79) set forth that the model fit of the scale is at a sufficient level. The dimension including items on the purpose and function for the use of Turkish by Syrian students was named as “Purpose/function”; items related with the daily use of Turkish were named as “Daily life” whereas the dimension including items including a negative approach towards Turkish was entitled as “Dysfunctional approach”. Reliability analyses were carried out for the scale as a result of which the Cronbach’s Alfa and Spearman-Brown coefficients were obtained as (.90) and (.86) for the “purpose/function”, (.83) and (.82) for the “daily life”, (.76) and (.74) for the “dysfunctional approach”. The findings of the present study indicate that SSATT is a valid and reliable tool in measuring the attitudes of Syrian university students towards Turkish.