Curiouser and Curiouser: Development and Validation of the Foreign Language Curiosity Scale (FLCS)

As a catalyst for exploration and intellectual growth, curiosity is vital for a successful navigation of the language acquisition journey. Although the significant role of curiosity in learning a language has been recently recognized, the complex nature of this concept merits further exploration. The present study is an attempt to deepen our understanding of the nature of curiosity in the language acquisition field by developing and validating a new language curiosity measure built upon Kashdan et al.'s (2009) CEI-II scale. To this end, a diverse sample of 999 English as a foreign language (EFL) learners from China, Iran, Morocco, Poland, and Spain was recruited. In this validation effort, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, convergent and discriminant validity assessment, and invariance testing were conducted. Foreign Language Curiosity Scale (FLCS) revealed to be a unidimensional measure with nine items loading onto a single latent variable. Evidence was offered for the validity, reliability, and invariance of FLCS items across gender, proficiency, and L1 groups. Therefore, FLCS can be introduced as a psychometrically valid measure for capturing language curiosity.