Language attitudes and aptitudes
Title: Language attitudes and aptitudes*
Author: Hassan Bouzidi
Description: Case study
Subject: Applied Linguistics
Publisher: LAP, Rabat
Date: 2015
The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate language attitudes and aptitudes in three representative areas of Morocco. The impact of these attitudes on the individual’s socio-psychological makeup, especially within the system of education, is examined and emphasis is put upon the relationship between students’ and parents’ attitudes, on the one hand, and achievement in second-language learning, on the other hand. The working hypothesis is that it helps learners of a second language, who wish to have a good command of the language, to hold a positive attitude towards the other speech community. By adopting a socio-psychological approach, I seek to examine my subjects’ affective as well as behavioural dispositions and the impact of the latter on any language planning programme in Morocco. By so doing I intend to contribute to the search for a most suitable approach to language-related problems in the country.
To achieve this purpose, a group of workers, students and teachers volunteered to fill out questionnaires on their evaluations of languages and language planning efforts in Morocco. Others volunteered to take part in the matched-guise experiments and interviews concerning their use of language and their desire to learn a second language. The attitude-behaviour relationship was also examined through observation, including participant observation. The subjects were stratified according to age, sex, mother tongue, social status and provenance.
The first three substantive sections of the dissertation aim at familiarising the reader with the social and linguistic situation in Morocco, social psychology as applied to language studies, and the data-eliciting techniques used in the thesis. The subsequent three chapters are concerned with the analysis and discussion of the corpus of data.
The results showed significant differences between the attitudes of the groups towards French, Standard Arabic and the vernacular languages (i.e. Moroccan Arabic and Amazigh). The correlation analysis showed a negative relationship between grades and the attitude variables. Only a weak relationship was found between socio-psychological variables and second-language proficiency. Attitudinal and motivational characteristics obtained from the students’ parents were included in the study, and a positive correlation between student language proficiency and parental language attitudes and motivation was obtained.
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*This book is an updated version of a PhD thesis submitted to the University of Glasgow (U.K.) in 1992.