As mentioned earlier, this dimension was separated into two sub- dimensions, namely, self-efficacy for academic reading and self-efficacy for extracurricular reading (Piercey, 2013). Self-efficacy for academic reading dealt with learners’ confidence in specific reading skills in school settings to correspond with teachers’ perspectives about reading competence (Piercey, 2013). Put it simply, this sub-dimension required learners to indicate their confidence in successfully engaging in academic reading tasks. As for self-efficacy for extracurricular reading, learners reflected their reading skills that were likely to be taken outside of the school setting (Piercey, 2013). Jiang (2021) adapted the dimension of reading skill self-efficacy from the measure of Piercey (2013) by shortening the number of items from 14 down to six, not classifying the items into those two sub-dimensions, and turning Piercey’s stem “How confident are you that you can…?” into statements using the stem “I can”. Specifically, Jiang’s items reflected learners’ confidence in understanding all words provided in texts, finding important details, guessing the meaning of new words, recognizing ideas being discussed, making predictions, and breaking long and complicated words into smaller parts such as prefixes and suffixes (see Appendix 1 for more details regarding two measures by Piercey (2013) and Jiang (2021)).
14 Reading test self-efficacy
As its name suggested, reading test self-efficacy aimed to measure how confident learners feel when they attend important reading tests (Piercey, 2013).
Although this dimension has not received much attention from scholars in language teaching and learning, it is popular in other fields such as social work education to measure learners’ confidence in their capabilities of passing licensing exams (Miller et al., 2015). It is necessary to measure self-efficacy in reading tests because some learners may read well but they do not do well in tests for some reasons such as test anxiety (McCabe, 2003). That means actual reading abilities may not be the same before and during test attendance.
Instead of asking participants all three separated questions related to their confidence in doing well on tests using the stem “How confident are you that you can…?” (Piercey, 2013), Jiang’s (2021) first item in this dimension aimed to measure participants’ confidence in achieving high scores on important reading tests in general. Jiang further added two statements that assessed participants’
confidence in their reading comprehension ability and becoming good English readers. It is noticeable that these two new statements did not follow Bandura’s (2006) principle on using the stem “I can”. Other examples that also did not follow Bandura’s guide on producing self-efficacy items are Kakaew and Damnet (2017) (e.g., “I believe that my proficiency in reading English texts develops every day”) and Mullins (2018) (e.g., “When reading in Spanish, I understand the meaning of endings that make words plurals, change verb tense (present, past, future) or are prefixes and suffixes.”). One possible reason for these kinds of wording is that changing structures might help attract respondents’ attention by avoiding carelessness in reading the statements and thinking carefully before marking their responses (see Appendix 1 for more details regarding two measures by Piercey (2013) and Jiang (2021)).
Reading self-efficacy for regulation
Mastering basic reading skills and acquiring the ability to regulate behaviors is crucial for learners’ development of reading competence (Piercey,
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2013; Smith et al., 2008). Self-regulated learners are those who seek to
“proactively and efficiently manage their lives to achieve self-set goals”
(Zimmerman & Cleary, 2006, p.56). Self-efficacy for regulated learning refers to learners’ beliefs about how they are capable of establishing goals and maintaining certain behaviors that are necessary for reaching those goals (Zimmerman et al., 1992). In some circumstances, although learners may have confidence in their academic performances, they may also hold doubts about how to be capable of organizing and directing their behaviors to their set goals (Piercey, 2013). This issue is not only discussed in the literacy development of children but also text comprehension and academic performance among tertiary students (Balashov et al., 2018; Park & Kim, 2021; Skibbe et al., 2019). Jiang (2021) provided a shortened version of measure assessing reading self-efficacy for regulation by turning 10 of Piercey’s (2013) questions using the stem “How well can you…?”
into five statements starting with “I can”. Specifically, these five statements reflect learners’ confidence in dealing with distraction, concentration, self-checking of reading comprehension, help with reading when needed, and completion of assignments on time (see Appendix 1 for more details regarding two measures by Piercey (2013) and Jiang (2021)).
General reading self-efficacy
Items in this dimension were developed to elicit general information about learners’ confidence in global reading ability (Piercey, 2013). Jiang (2021) neither followed the stem “How confident are you that you will…” in Piercey’s (2013) measure nor used the stem “I can” by Bandura (2006). Although all items in this dimension of Piercey (2013) were positively coded, Jiang (2021) started this dimension with two negatively coded items. In fact, before reaching this dimension, participants were required to answer 14 positively coded items in the previous three dimensions (Jiang, 2021). The addition of two negatively coded items might serve the purpose of generating attention-check items to avoid common method bias (Maniaci & Rogge, 2014). As a result, Jiang (2021) can screen out careless respondents and remove those responses prior to data analysis. In addition, Jiang
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(2021) increased the number of items from four in Piercey’s measure to eleven.
Newly added items reflected learners’ confidence in some activities such as reading difficult articles and answering questions posed by teachers (see Appendix 1 for more details regarding two measures by Piercey (2013) and Jiang (2021)).