English Language Attitude

Abstract

Diahan, Jamiel P.

Attitude of Grade 12 Senior High School Students toward English Unpublished undergraduate thesis. Bukidnon State University, Malaybalay City, March 2018.

This study aimed at investigating the attitude of the Grade 12 senior high school students in Bukidnon State University-Secondary Laboratory School in terms of their gender and strands or track of specialization. An adapted survey questionnaire employed upon a total of 40 randomly selected respondents coming from the four strand of senior high school which is the GAS, STEM, HUMMS and ABM. In terms of the gender profile of the respondents, 15 were male and 25 were female. The results of the quantitative descriptive analysis showed that the Grade 12 students have a

One of the most significant factors is the affective aspect. The affective aspect arrays the emotions, attitudes, feelings and beliefs that can condition behaviors. In other words, learning English is no exception. It is important to learn English through the affective variables and it includes the attitude. This is also added by Shams (2008) there are different factors that influence the learning process such as motivation, attitudes, anxiety, learning, achievements, aptitudes, intelligence, age, personalities, etc. in the context of language learning. Moreover, both aforementioned authorities mentioned attitude as one of the factors affecting the language learning. In other words, achievement in a target language relies not only on cognitive capacity but also on the learner’s attitudes toward language learning. This means that learning language should be approached mainly as a social and psychological phenomenon rather than as a purely academic one. Thus, attitude is an important variable in the learning of

Wherein for this study, the object or thought to be evaluated is the English language to find the general attitude of the respondents. Furthermore, attitudes may be positive, negative, or neutral (Walley et al., 2009)(as cited in Jain, 2014). In other words, there are only three responses to evaluate the attitude of the individual. These are maybe the positive attitude or the favorable/belief/good emotion, neutral or the impartially attitude of an individual and the negative attitude or the dislike/disbelief/unfavorable responses. Learning could not come about easily unless students have positive attitudes toward it on one hand, and attitudes might originate from life experiences and their daily life of living, on the other hand.

Language attitude also is influenced by several factors and is according to ones’ personality, age, gender, the environment, and or academically such as the section, year of study, specialization etc. This study anchors the gender and specialization as the variables in identifying the students’ attitude toward learning English.

In terms of gender, many language researchers believed that that female might be better than men at learning languages. As described by Ellis (2012), female are more open to novel structures in the target language and eradicate the incorrect forms in their interlanguage more readily. This explains that female students possess superiority