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designing the questionnaireWhen second language teachers and researchers survey opinions, beliefs, and attitudes, they tend to make use of Likert-type scales (DeVellis 1991). Since the purpose of the present research is to explore future teachers’ attitudes and their self-reports of their digital competence, a questionnaire based on Likert-type scales was designed (Figure 1).

Figure 1:

Example of using Likert-type scales in the questionnaire

The questionnaire consisted of three sections: (1) self-perceptions of student teachers’ digital competence, (2) student teachers’ attitudes toward digital technologies and (3) demographics. The total number of items is 52. Each of the first two sections was made up of 22 6-point Likert scale items (1=Completely Agree, 2=Mostly Agree, 3=Slightly Agree, 4=Slightly Disagree, 5=Mostly Disagree, 6=Completely Disagree). We did not adopt the commonly used Likert scale with 5 or 7 responses with a neutral midpoint, because a 6-point Likert scale tends to have a higher degree of discrimination and reliability than a 5-point one (Chomeya 2010) and increases measurement precision. By way of having no middle category, respondents are urged to make a decision outside of the frequently preferred middle ground, which could reduce the production of construct-irrelevant variance (Nemoto & Beglar 2014). Items in the first two sections are based on six constructs and 4 constructs respectively which will be presented in 3.3. The order of the items was mixed up to avoid monotony and participants’ unconscious tendency to repeat their previous choices. The third section of the questionnaire mainly included demographic information such as gender, age, and years of receiving pre-service or in-service teacher education.

conducting the surveyThis study was first piloted using the print versions of the questionnaire in an advanced TEFL seminar on Oct. 16th, 2019 with 16 participants from a university in Bavaria. According to the feedback in terms of clarity, format, and length, the questionnaire was revised and transferred into a digital version by using https://www.wjx.cn/, which is an online website to create questionnaires. Then the official survey was conducted by asking student teachers to scan the QR code or type in the link generated by the website in two lectures on Nov. 5th, 2019 as well as in a seminar on Nov. 19th, 2019. The preliminary analysis of the collected data was shown to the student teachers near the end of the lectures as incentives for their research participation. The number of valid responses is 181.