Essay Example on THE EFFECTS OF PARENTS LANGUAGE ATTITUDE ON THEIR CHILDREN'S

The Case Study of Turkish Students in Elementary and Secondary Schools and Their Parents 1 Background Attitude is a point of view about other people objects or concepts There are some factors which affect the attitude of people Parents social environment and upbringing influence children's attitudes Similarly there are many factors that have an effect on language attitude Positive and negative attitudes are possible Ryan explains language attitudes as any affective cognitive or behavioural index of evaluative reactions toward different language varieties or speakers Ryan 1982 Attitude also plays a very important role in language learning The social environment of individuals includes their parents According to Gardner 1985 one of factors in second language L2 development for young children is parents beliefs or attitudes toward language learning There are numerous studies made about the language attitude One of them has been studied by Rula Jamil Yazigy The research aims at investigating some social and psychological factors in the learning of English as a foreign language in two universities in Lebanon In this work some of the factors are studied These factors are students educational and social background parental influence attitudes towards foreign languages in general and English in particular attitudes towards English speaking people effect of first language attitudes towards the English language course and the English course teacher attitudes towards self and native people and the effect of the political situation 

English language is viewed as a worldwide language for quite a while 

More specifically English is considered as the most essential foreign language in Turkey and it has an significant role in business and education In Turkish primary and secondary schools there is an English lesson It is known that English is taught to the children as a foreign language When children learn English the two matters questioned are how the parents language attitudes affect this situation and whether students attitudes to learning a FL in school is related to parents attitudes towards FL learning and their child's language study 3 Data and Data Analysis In this study it is aimed to develop a valid and descriptive Likert type attitude scale to measure the attitudes of parents and the students towards English The measuring tool will be an attitude questionnaire focusing on the attitudes towards English language and learning the language While developing the scale related literature will be searched I will benefit experts ideas The data will be from students who are studying in different types of primary and secondary schools and their parents Firstly my research will consist of 50 items adopted by the Likert type attitude scale and developed by Gömleksiz 2003 as the data collection instrument

This scale will be applied on 100 students and their parents for a pilot scheme to evaluate the reliability and validity of the test Language Attitude Scale is Likert Type with 5 option gradations The items are graded as I totally agree 5 I agree 4 I partially agree 3 I do not agree 2 and I totally disagree 1 The questionnaire will be prepared in Turkish because of that the students and parents are Turkish speakers Students will be asked to attitudes towards English language and learning English The questionnaire for parents will contain two parts of questions In the first part there will be questions relating to attitudes towards foreign language and in the second part questions about attitudes towards English language learning For the last phase I will apply the questionnaire to the participants I will give basic information about the rationale of the scale to the participants The data collected from both students and parents will be analysed by the SPSS Program pointing to answer the research questions