Language attitudes of Croatian vocational school students toward the English language

Batur, Nikolina. (2016). Language attitudes of Croatian vocational school students toward the English language. Diploma Thesis. Filozofski fakultet u Zagrebu, Department of English Language and Literature. [mentor Starčević, Anđel and Kalogjera, Damir].

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Abstract

Learning English as a second language in vocational schools in Croatia is an interesting field for examining language attitudes. Since the introduction of the matura exam, many vocational school students have struggled with learning English and obtaining the desired grade and level of proficiency. Attitudes towards a language may reveal a lot about the problems students encounter. Expressing positive or negative feelings towards English can be related to their intentions of improving language skills for work-related purposes or learning the language for its own sake. In this paper, attitudes of students of three different vocational schools are examined through a questionnaire in order to relate their attitudes to their use of English. The initial hypothesis is that vocational school students, even though most of them show a strong desire to improve their knowledge, have negative attitudes towards English, due to problems encountered during the learning process. However, the results show that vocational school students have quite positive attitude toward English and perceive it as a crucial factor of their future development. On the other hand, the findings also point to some problems vocational school students encounter in class – e.g. dissatisfaction with the traditional way of teaching and lack of communication. These findings might help us understand the way these students perceive the language learning process and might offer ideas about how to improve English teaching/learning in vocational schools.

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