Creating a Questionnaire to Explore Language Teacher Multilingual Beliefs and Practices

Abstract

Ukraine is a multilingual country and its language policy strives at promoting language diversity. However, foreign language teaching is predominantly based on monolingual practice and languages are taught in isolation from one another in a foreign language classroom. These facts lead to realizing that language teachers should be trained in order to be able to promote their students' multilingualism through employing their multilingual resources. Prior to the multilingual training or programme design, it is important to evaluate teachers’ multilingual beliefs and teaching practices in order to make targeted and informed changes. The paper describes the evolution of the questionnaire to explore Ukrainian university language teachers’ beliefs about multilingualism and multilingual practices. For this purpose, a detailed insight into the phases and steps of the questionnaire development is presented. This comprises scrutiny of theory-based evidence to map the constituents of language teacher multilingualism, the description of how critical concepts for the study were identified and how relevant content for each part of the questionnaire was generated. In addition, the verification process of the questionnaire is described in details, which included item analysis carried out with Cronbach’s Alpha to verify internal consistency of the items, participants’ feedback and expert’s opinion to explore content validity and participants’ feedback to check feasibility. The study invited 37 language teachers, representing different European and Ukrainian universities, to fill in the pilot questionnaire. The preliminary results of the pilot version are discussed and a finalized version of the questionnaire is offered. In addition, this study is to add to the knowledge of teachers’ current perspectives on practices in multilingual education.