Secondary students’ attitudes and exposure to English : a sociolinguistic study

Abstract

Language attitude studies play an integral role in gauging the perceived strength of a language. This study seeks to investigate the attitudes that a number of secondary students attending four Maltese state schools have towards English. In addition, this study seeks to identify what factors have shaped the learners’ attitudes and explore relationships between such attitudes and the students’ degree of exposure to English respectively. While the students’ attitudes and exposure to English were recorded via self-administered questionnaires, photographs of the schools’ linguistic landscape were taken to provide a more complete picture of the phenomenon understudy. The three category conceptual model proposed by Abrams et al. (2009) and Williams’ (1991a) variations in attitude model were used as frameworks of analysis in order to measure students’ attitudes towards the status of English, whereas content analysis was used to measure the collected photographic data. Furthermore, the study’s findings were considered in terms of non-linguistic variables such as gender and locality. An analysis of the study’s findings revealed that most of the students and their parents held positive attitudes towards English and that the attitudes held by the students and their parents were somewhat similar. Moreover, instrumental motivations towards learning English were highly prevalent among these learners. In addition, the schools’ support of the use of English through the use of different media was also evident. Similarly, most of the students in this study claimed that English constitutes the language of instruction in their English language lessons. Furthermore, the presence of English in the schools’ linguistic landscape largely took the form of cultural and promotional content as well as informative notices.