Assessing L2 student writing feedback literacy: A scale development and validation study

Student feedback literacy has emerged as an encompassing term that concerns how students approach, use, and evaluate feedback and manage their feelings in the process. As research on student feedback literacy in L2 writing has been theoretical and qualitative in nature, there is a scarcity of valid and reliable measures for assessing L2 student writing feedback literacy. The present study aimed to develop and validate the L2 Student Writing Feedback Literacy Scale. A sample of 224 Chinese undergraduate students at the scale development stage, and 1868 Chinese undergraduate students at the scale validation stage, participated in the study. The final version of the scale comprised 28 items assessing five dimensions: Appreciating Feedback, Acknowledging Different Feedback Sources, Making Judgments, Managing Affect and Taking Action. Confirmatory factor analysis showed that the scale has good psychometric properties and measurement invariances across gender, grade and discipline. This instrument may allow writing researchers and practitioners to better understand L2 students' beliefs and competence in evaluating and using writing feedback and also identify strategies to improve their writing feedback literacy.