Zainab Abolfazli Khonbi (Kosar University of Bojnord, Iran) & Dr. Karim Sadeghi (Urmia University, Iran)
This paper, delves into the attitudes of Iranians towards English which is taught as a foreign language at universities and institutes in Iran. In particular, it focuses mainly on the effect of university degree on Iranian students’ attitudes towards English; it also briefly considers the role of gender and age range in this respect. To this end 114 participants from Urmia university [including EFL students at Masters of Arts (N= 13) and Bachelor of Arts (N= 43) degrees and Chemistry students (N= 29, hereto referred to as laymen)], and female learners from Urmia language institutes (N= 29) were randomly selected. They were required to complete a validated and reliable researcher-made five point Likert-scale attitude towards English questionnaire. The participants were found to have positive attitudes towards English. However, while ANOVA for each single item revealed a few cases of significant difference between laymen and other groups, a more general ANOVA indicated no significant difference among the university degree groups in their attitudes towards English. T-test and a further ANOVA also revealed no significant difference between the two genders and among the age range groups in terms of their attitudes towards English. The paper concludes with further detailed findings and implications.
The above abstract is a part of the article which was accepted at The International Conference on Current Issues of Languages, Dialects and Linguistics (WWW.TLLL.IR), 2-3 February 2017, Ahwaz.
