Revealing attitude toward statistics among MA TEFL students: A Systemic Functional Linguistics perspective

Abstract

Higher education students’ attitudes toward statistics are of great importance as these may affect student performance and achievement in statistics learning. Despite some interest in attitude towards statistics among higher education students in language-related fields and the broader area of tertiary-level education, the different types of existing attitudes toward statistics might remain uncovered. Applying the Attitude system as an analytical framework, this study explores how higher education students use linguistic resources to indicate statistics-related attitude before, during and after learning. The narratives of learning statistics were obtained from a group of MA TEFL students (n=25) who participated in an introductory course on basic statistical concepts and procedures, among others. The study makes visible a great variety and a considerable variation of linguistic means which students use to express statistics-related attitude as Judgement, Appreciation and Affect, emerging over time. As such, this study advances methodological practices and training in the field.