ATTITUDES & APPLICATION
Attitudes is linked to a person’s values and beliefs and promotes or discourages and choices made in all realms of activity, whether academic or informal.
Positive attitudes about language and language learning may be as much the result of success as the cause (effective strategies that enable them to take advantage of instructional opportunities presented to them.
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•Attitude has cognitive, affective and con active components (i.e involves beliefs, emotional reactions and behavioral tendencies related to object of the attitude) and (broad term) consists of an underlying psycholinguistics predisposition to act or evaluate behavior in a certain way.
•In addition, students are affected by the attitudes and examples of their peers, teachers and parents with respect to language study and by social and institutional language policies as reflected in, for example, required courses of language study, both first and second, in schools. The status of a language in a society, whether native or second language, further shapes the social climate for language study.
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Attitudes to language are strongly influenced by social and political factors, such as what happens in Scandinavia.
Language attitudes also affect intelligibility, so people find it easier to understand languages and dialects spoken by people they like or admire. A closely related point, at least for majority group members, is that people are more highly motivated, and consequently often more successful in acquiring a second language when they feel positive towards those who use it. Clearly, attitudes to language have interesting implications both for politicians and teachers. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Generalization : a statement describing general behavior that does not apply all the time.
Stereotype : an exaggerated belief about a group often based on a lack of information or contact with members of that group.
People generally do not hold opinions about languages in a vacuum. They develop attitudes towards languages which reflect their views about those who speak the languages, and the contexts and functions with which they are associated. When people listen to accents or languages they have never heard before, their -
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Assessments are totally random. There is no pattern to them. In other words there is no universal consensus about which languages sound most beautiful and which most ugly, despite people’s beliefs that some languages are just inherently more beautiful than others.
Exercise : What are your attitudes towards the following dialects and languages :
a. Malaysian d. Karonese
b. Javanese e.
c. Bataknese f. German language.
MATERIAL INTRO. TO SOCIOLINGUISTICS FORMATIVE 4
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| APPLIED LINGUISTICS A |
