Attitudes of Students of French Toward Required Language Study¹

Abstract

The goal of this study is to examine the attitude of students who were about to complete the final course of their language requirement in order to determine their perception of the total requirement experience. The investigation focused on three areas: 1) whether or not students considered the language requirement a worthwhile experience, 2) whether or not their attitude toward the language requirement had improved during the time they spent in required courses, and 3) their attitude toward foreign language study as a part of a university curriculum. The results revealed that students have a much more positive attitude toward required language study than is generally believed and that a critical factor in this determination is their perception of their own progress toward mastery of the language. The majority of students also reported that their attitude toward the language requirement had improved during the time they had spent in required courses. Finally, students expressed a surprisingly strong conviction that the study of a foreign language should be a required part of a university education.

Student Perceptions of Foreign Language Study: A Qualitative Analysis of Foreign Language Autobiographies

“…As in Walker's study, there was a strong sentiment among students for abolishing all university FL requirements. Morello (1988) found that antipathy toward the language requirement was, in part, a function of whether students reached their desired level of proficiency. A survey of more than 100 undergraduate French students who were completing their final required quarter of language study found that these students were more positively disposed toward required study than those in Schotta's study, but just barely so.…”

'Naive' native speakers and judgements of oral proficiency in Spanish

“…Since few people voluntarily study a foreign language in order to talk to their teacher, it is safe to say that most learners aspire to communicating with a wide range of speakers outside the classroom and far from the setting in which they have studied the language. This is probably even true (Morello, 1988) of a good number of those American students who take a foreign language as part of a required course of studies.…”

L2 learners' language attitudes and their assessment

“…The students surveyed were Spanish majors and minors and it was not surprising to find that their attitudes to Spanish were positive across all subscales. Prior research has shown that even in lower‐level courses students generally have positive attitudes towards L2 learning (Davis & Markham, 1991; Morello, 1988; Price & Gascoigne, 2006; Roberts, 1992). In this study, “Value of multilingualism” received the highest mean score, suggesting that the students overwhelmingly agreed that speaking more than one language was beneficial.…”