Understanding attitudes in relation to language learning
Attitudes play a major role in language teaching and learning. The relationship between the two is very intricate.
“Interest in attitude research can also be explained by wide acknowledgement of the relationship between attitudes and successful learning” (Bartram, 2010:33)
Before proceeding to subsequent details, it is of necessity to provide a definition to the linguistic attitude concept. The linguistic attitudes construct is operationalized in the Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics (1992) as follows:
Linguistic attitudes are: “the attitudes which speakers of different languages or language varieties have towards each other’s languages or to their own language. Expressions of positive or negative feelings towards a language may reflect impressions of linguistic difficulty or simplicity, ease or difficulty of learning, degree of importance, elegance, social status, etc. Attitudes towards a language may also show what people feel about the speakers of that language” (p:198)
Understanding the effect of attitudes on L2 and foreign languages is not an unexplored area in language teaching enquiries (Bartram, 2010:33). There is certainly a relationship between language proficiency and attitudes towards the language, but the question is: how can we be sure that we are dealing with attitudes but not something else. Can we isolate attitudes from all other possible variables? Oller and Perkins (1980) for example found that there is zero correlation between second-language proficiency and attitudes.