Individual Variables, Attitudes towards English and Being a Teacher: A study on Prospective Teachers

Abstract

The achievement in learning a foreign language depends not only on cognitive factors such as intelligence, aptitude etc., but also on affective factors such as attitude and motivation. As the main branch of prospective teachers of English is teaching a language, their attitudes towards English and towards being a teacher are of vital importance in their future careers. The purpose of this descriptive study is to determine whether the attitudes of the students of English Language Teaching Department towards English affect their attitudes towards being a teacher of English and whether the students’ attitudes indicate significant differences with regard to individual variables such as gender, class, the types of High Schools from which they have graduated, their socio-economic background, and whether there is a teacher in their family. The sample group of the study were composed 540 prospective English teachers of the first, second, third and fourth year students of the Department of English Language Teaching at Buca Faculty of Education at Dokuz Eylül University, İzmir. For data collection, personal information sheet, the scale for attitudes towards English developed by Altunay (2002) (Alpha Reliability Coefficient: 0.96) and the scale for attitudes towards Being a Teacher developed by Semerci (1999) (Alpha Reliability Coefficient: 0.68) were used. The results indicate that the more positive the students’ attitudes towards English are, the more positive the students’ attitudes towards teaching profession are. Furthermore, when attitudes towards English and towards being a teacher are compared it is indicated that the students’ attitudes towards English are a little bit higher.