Reexamining the Construct Validity of the First L2 Grit Test: A Conceptual Replication of the Scale-Construction Processes within Teimouri, Plonsky, and Tabandeh (2022)

Teimouri et al. (2022) created an influential L2 grit scale that L2 researchers are using to investigate grit in second language acquisition (SLA) research. They first drafted 20 L2 grit items based on Duckworth et al.’s (2007) domain-general grit scale. They piloted the 20 items on 35 L1-Persian English learners and used the data to reduce the items to 12. They then presented 191 new L1-Persian English learners with the 12 items: After analyses, they reduced the items to 9 comprising two components, perseverance of effort and consistency of interest. Because of the importance of the scale on SLA research, we investigated whether we could reproduce the scale’s item-reduction from 20 to 9: That is, would the 20 original items reduce to the same 9 after similar analyses, but with data from a different learner sample? We had 582 L1-English learners of Spanish take the 20-item, L2 grit survey. The analyses did not lead us to the same 9 items; rather, 17 were retained with three factors. Post-hoc, we explored whether Teimouri et al.’s final 9-item, L2 grit model with two constructs would fit our new data using structural equation modeling. It fit, but with significant parameter-estimate differences that further question the composition of the effort and interest constructs. L2 grit may certainly be important for L2 learning, as researchers are finding by using the 9-item scale, but researchers should be aware that the field may not have a definitive way to measure L2 grit: in particular, we found “consistency of interest” to be uninformative with our sample. Researchers should continue to investigate how to best measure L2 grit and publish their data and data-analysis code with their L2 grit research, so that the scales can be better examined, and scores from them can be better interpreted.