Constructing and Validating Professional Attitude Scale for Iranian TEFL Prospective Teachers

This study was carried out to develop a new scale for measuring TEFL prospective teachers’ attitudes toward the teaching profession to be used as an instrument in the admission procedure of Iranian Teacher education Universities. The participants were two groups of junior and senior prospective teachers (n= 54 & n=186) majoring in Teaching English as a Foreign Language at Farhangian University in Iran. After reviewing the literature and interviewing 54 participants, the initial draft of the scale containing 38 items using a 5-point Likert type was developed. After revising the draft based on the experts’ comments and the feedback from a group of participants, the new version with 32 items was completed by 186 participants and their responses were submitted for statistical analyses. As a result of the exploratory factor analyses, the scale was reduced to 22 items across four factors, entitled economic factor, social factor, professional factor, and teacher competency factor. The reliability coefficients were found to be 0.70 for the whole scale, and 0.67, 0.69, 0.76 and 0.73 for the subscales, respectively. The results of confirmatory factor analyses indicated that the four-factor solution possessed good data-model fit across all indices, χ2 (203, N = 186) = 356.38, p < 0.000, χ2/df = 1.76, GFI = 0.95, NNFI = 0.92, CFI = 0.93 SRMR = 0.05, RMSEA = 0.064. The results demonstrated that the scale was valid and reliable to measure professional attitudes of TEFL prospective teachers.