Validating an Instrument for EFL Learners’ English New Media Literacy and the Relation to English Language Self-efficacy

Abstract

An increasing amount of research has been conducted on the integration of new media in English language learning and teaching, while limited studies have explored English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ English new media literacy. This quantitative study developed an instrument with two questionnaires for assessing EFL learners’ new media literacy and English language self-efficacy. It further investigated the associations between the two constructs. The participants were 486 EFL learners at a comprehensive university in China, who took a compulsory language course for improving their overall English proficiency. The results validated the two questionnaires and further confirmed the correlations between the two constructs. It was very striking to see that both functional consuming and functional prosuming literacy played the most significant and positive role for predicting all the four aspects of learners’ English self-efficacy. Moreover, critical consuming was found to act as a significant predicator of students’ self-efficacy in listening and reading. This study sheds light on the role of new media literacy on EFL learners’ self-efficacy, and also provides EFL instructors and policy-makers with pedagogical implications on the effective integration of new media literacy education into EFL teaching and learning.