Appraising Bachelor First Year Education Students’ Affective, Behavioral and Cognitive Attitudes towards Learning English

Abstract

This article attempts to appraise bachelor first year education students’ affective, behavioral and cognitive attitudes towards learning English. Attitude, which retains affective, behavioral and cognitive components, is a specific evaluative mental disposition towards certain ideas, events, objects or people. The affective component indicates the feeling or emotional aspect, the behavioral component refers to the intentional aspect, whereas the cognitive component signifies the aspects of beliefs and knowledge. A cross-sectional survey design was adopted across the three campuses situated in Makawanpur District, Nepal to carry out the research study in the academic year 2018-2019. Five-point Likert scale statement items concerning the attitude towards learning English were administered to the mass of 277 students. Simple random sampling technique was followed to select 270 students as respondents for the study by maintaining the confidence level (95%) and the margin of error (1%). The collected data were statistically analyzed by using IBM SPSS Version 25. The percent and the median score (4) of attitude of the students showed that they had a positive attitude towards learning English, and it indicated that they “Agreed” with the statement items. The Kruskal- Wallis H test showed that the distribution of the median of affective attitude, behavioral attitude and cognitive attitude towards learning English was the same across the categories of campus. It indicates that the students of the three campuses had a similar attitude towards learning it.