A Cross-Cultural Adaptation and Validation of a Second-Language (L2) Motivation Instrument in South Korea

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Aims

As the authors themselves explain, the objective of the work is not too ambitious, although it is true that the need for adapted translation of the questionnaire is justified.

 

Rationale to Validate the Instrument in a Korean Context

Given the limitations of the objectives of this work, it would be necessary to know the exact adjustments and adaptations that the authors made and the precise motivations of the authors to make these changes.

 

Discussion

According to the authors, “we found that adjustment in translation and cultural adaptation in Korean context is much needed because participants may understand the translated questions differently due to the linguistic and cultural differences between Korean and English”. However, it is not clear enough to this reader whether this claim is the result of the authors’ research or other authors’ previous research. Have the authors compared the results of the original translation of the questionnaire with those obtained from the culturally adapted questionnaire with a similar group of participants? What were the exact results?

 

Conclusions and limitation

It is striking that the authors have only identified one limitation (concerning the type of target students) when validating their questionnaire translation. Perhaps they should review their method and results again. It is equally striking that there are no future lines of work or pedagogical implications of the study for further research.

 

Academic writing in English

The use of English is so poor that fluent reading is impossible on many occasions. In order to be published, this work must be professionally proofread. Some paragraphs should be rewritten. The manuscript cannot be published in its current form.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors,

Congratulations for your work. It is interesting and useful.

I would rewrite the abstract, it is too specific and not catchy.

I would also check for parts where the text may get fuzzy or too specific.

A spell check and English language use is mandatory. There are language errors right from the beginning. For example: provides has acceptable psychometrics properties of questionnaire which is culturally 13
and structurally appropriate in Korean college context.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The article is devoted to the actual problem on cross-cultural adaptation and validation of a second-language (L2) Motivation Instrument by Taguchi et al. among Korean English learners. The authors convincingly argue the need for such Instrument for research of EFL motivations in college students in South Korea.

The strength of the study is the involvement of a large number of participants (1373 college students from 9 universities and 11 majors), the use of the back-translation process for translation of the Instrument, as well as EFA and CFA for psychometrics testing of the Instrument.

However, the study and its presentation in the article have shortcoming and raises questions:

• The procedure for translation (and back-translation) and cross-cultural adaptation of the questionnaire is not described in sufficient detail: which items caused difficulties in translation, for what reasons some items were excluded from the questionnaire at this stage, etc. Also, I believe that Appendix A is uninformative, as it contains only the English version of the questionnaire. I suggest that authors place a table in the appendix that will contain the English and Korean versions of each items of the Instrument, as well as notes on the specifics of their translation and adaptation (or deletion) in the Korean context;
• I don't understand why data only of 300 respondents were used for the EFA;
• Tables 2 and 4 take up a lot of space in the article, but do not give a visual representation of the CFA and EFA results;
• The authors use Cronbach's alpha coefficient to check the reliability of each factors, however, it is possible to recommend using the McDonald's omega coefficient for this purpose. The advantage of the Omega coefficient is the ability to assess the correlations between scale items and the General factor. See, for example: Revelle, W., & Zinbarg, R.E. Coecients alpha, beta, omega and the glb: Comments on Sijtsma. Psychometrika 2009, 74, 145–154;
• Table 5 contains correlations between all factors, but they have not been analyzed or interpreted in the text of the article. At the same time, the article does not provide descriptive statistics for each of the obtained factors.

Thus, the article discusses an important and relevant problem, but the research procedure, results and conclusions require a more detailed and visual presentation.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors have addressed most of my comments. Therefore, I would recommend the article's publication in its present form.

Author Response

We highly appreciate your reviewing.

Thank you so much.

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear Authors,

You have done a great job of improving the article. I appreciate that you took into account almost all of my recommendations. Now the article contains all the necessary information about cross-cultural adaptation and validation of a second-language (L2) Motivation Instrument by Taguchi et al. among Korean English learners.

I still have questions regarding the design of tables 2 and 4, and Appendices, I think they need to be made more compact. But I hope that the editorial team can help meet these challenges.

Summarizing, I recommend this article for publication. Maybe it needs a little editing, but this is up to the Editor’s decision.

Author Response

 

We will reach to the editor's team and adjust our tables and appendices to journal format.

Thank you so much for your reviewing and feedback.