Initial Development and Validation of the Multilingual Education Scale

Applicability of multilingual education, which is applied in many countries, has increasingly proficiency and learning been a question of debate in Turkey because of the inclusion of living languages and dialects lessons into educational institutions. The purpose of this study is to develop a valid and reliable Likert-type scale to determine the perception of multilingual education of teachers with the inclusion of living languages and dialects lesson into curricula. For this purpose, a study was conducted with teachers in Turkey. After the instrument was constructed based on the literature, field experts evaluated it, and revisions were made to clarify the language and the design. Following this process, a pilot study was conducted among 150 teachers, resulting in a scale comprising 28 items after the alterations were made. Then, the instrument was sent to 898 teachers utilizing a snowball technique. Exploratory factor analysis was applied to determine the validity of the scale. Factor analysis showed that the scale had a single factor explaining 72.4% of the total variance. The scale’s KMO (Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin) was .974; and the Barlett test was 21828.8. For the sake of validity and reliability, the Cronbach’s alpha internal consistency coefficient for the scale (content validity, construct validity, distinctiveness validity, internal consistency and reliability) was determined as 0.97. Thus, the conclusion can be made that the scale is applicable and reliable enough for future development.