The development and validation of a scale on student AI literacy in L2 writing: A domain-specific perspective

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming the educational landscape, especially in second language (L2) writing, reshaping how students approach the learning and practice of L2 writing. This shift has highlighted the importance of student AI literacy, which enables students to harness the power of AI tools and navigate the complexities of L2 writing more effectively and responsibly. Despite its significance, research on student AI literacy in L2 writing remains scarce, and there is a notable absence of instruments to measure, diagnose and track its development among L2 student writers. Heeding the call for developing psychometrically validated scales tailored to specific domains or disciplines, this study aims to develop and validate the L2 Writing-Student AI Literacy Scale (L2W-SAILS) for teachers and students to operationalise and assess student AI literacy in L2 writing. Building on relevant seminal works, this study proposed a four-dimension AI literacy framework, including ‘understanding’, ‘use’, ‘evaluation’, and ‘ethics’. Guided by this framework, a 22-item self-reported questionnaire on student AI literacy was developed and validated through exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis involving respectively 435 and 350 Chinese university students. The results confirm that the L2W-SAILS is a reliable measurement scale for assessing student AI literacy in L2 writing, and the proposed four-dimension model is a robust representation of student AI literacy. The findings also contribute to a pedagogical framework that informs AI-assisted teaching and learning of L2 writing.