Attitudes toward Mother Tongue and Academic Performance: Evidence from Monolingual Context in the Southern Philippines

Michael B Cahapay

doi:10.22437/ijolte.v4i1.9174

Abstract

The influence of language attitude on the academic achievement of young children in the monolingual context has not been explored. Thus, this research ascertained the degree of relationship between attitudes toward the mother tongue and the academic performance of the learners. It entailed correlation research design. The respondents were 20 Grade II pupils in a rural public school considered as monolingual in the southern Philippines. The data gathered were treated using frequency distribution, weighted mean, percentage rate, and Pearson Product Moment Correlation Coefficient. It was found out that there is a significant relationship between attitudes toward the mother tongue and the academic performance of learners. Amid the vast body of diverse researches in the area of language education, the present study weaves pieces of evidence that attitudes of learners toward mother tongue are associated with their academic performance in the context of a monolingual environment. It is suggested that such a conclusion should be further tested in other contexts.

Highlights

Scholars have often extolled, either directly or indirectly, the importance of the attitudes that learners hold toward the mother tongue as a facilitator to increased learning gain
Amid the vast body of diverse researches in the area of language education, the present study weaves pieces of evidence that attitudes of learners toward mother tongue are associated with their academic performance in the context of a monolingual environment
The concept of social identities is believed to be most influential when people view their membership in a particular group to be essential to their identity, and they sense strong relations to the group (Leaper, 2011). Following this theory in the monolingual context of this study, it is expected that the learners who were mostly raised within their cultural group would have favorable attitudes toward their language

Summary

Introduction

Either directly or indirectly, the importance of the attitudes that learners hold toward the mother tongue as a facilitator to increased learning gain. The construct of language attitude, defined as the feelings people hold about a language, is often associated by scholars to different learning outcomes (Carrol, 1964; Gardner, 1985; Crystal, 1997; Dornyei, 2009). It appears, that an essential consideration that may have been overlooked in the entire equation of the discourse about the influence of attitudes toward mother tongue on the learning gains is the type of linguistic environment. A vast body of recent studies that investigated the language attitudes of learners is either fixed on mother tongue against the background of multilingualism, restricted on the learning of a particular foreign language, or unrelated to the possible learning gains of the learners (e.g. Hohenthal, 2003; Rahman, 2008; Chalak, & Kassaian, 2010; Galloway, 2011; Liu & Zhao, 2011; Bobkina, & Fernandez, 2012; Mamun, Rahman, Rahman, & Hossain, 2012; Yang, 2012; Asmari, 2013; Tahaineh & Daana, 2013; Becker, 2014; Beyogle, 2014; Goktepe, 2014; Ahmed, 2015; Samadani & Ibnian, 2015; Agbalu, 2016; DejiAfuye, 2016; Naima, 2017; Papapavlou & Mavromati, 2017; Salmon & Menjívar, 2017; Tódortodor & Dégi, 2017; Bouhmama & Dendane, 2018; Mäkelä & Posti, 2018; Mbato & Kharismawan, 2018; Teklesellassie & Boersma, 2018; Zebaria, Allob, & Mohammadzadehc, 2018; Dharmaputra, 2019; Nduwimana, 2019; Fischer & Niebuhr, 2020; Orfan, 2020; Tsunemoto & McDonough, 2020; Vennela & Kandharaja, 2020; Yilmaz, 2020)

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion