A New Approach to Assessing Strategic Learning: The Case of Self-Regulation in Vocabulary Acquisition

This article draws on work done in educational psychology to propose a new approach to generating a psychometrically-based measure of second language learners ’ strategic learning, operationalized as their self-regulatory capacity, as an alternative to the scales traditionally used to quantify language learning strategy use. The self-regulation instrument was developed through a three-phase process, focusing on the realm of vocabulary learning. The first phase involved the generation of an item pool, the second a pilot study in a sizeable sample, and the third an evaluation of the psychometric properties of the revised instrument, using confirmatory and exploratory factor analysis. The results show that the…