An Analysis of Primary and Secondary Education Students' Attitudes Towards English and Galician

Abstract

This comparative study seeks to contribute to the existing literature on attitudes in multilingual contexts by exploring attitudes of 99 students towards two varieties of Galician (standard and non-standard) and two varieties of English (native and non-native) at the end of primary and secondary education. Results on age revealed the influence of this variable and that some stigmas are still attached to the non-standard variety of Galician while participants showed a preference for standard varieties, in particular the native variety in foreign language teaching. Furthermore, the findings unveiled a female preference for standard varieties of Galician and English, although female students presented more positive attitudes than males in most of the items of the quantitative part of the study. Finally, some conclusions and underlying pedagogical implications of the current investigation will be put forward with a view to fostering positive attitudes towards all the languages involved in multilingual schools.