Student teachers’ attitudes towards the compulsory English courses at the Turkish universities

Abstract

The intent of the current study is to explore teacher candidates’ cognitive, affective, and behavioral attitude towards the compulsory English courses at universities and the relation of attitude with the participants’ genders, studying departments, graduated high schools, goals and hours for studying English. The cross-sectional survey and correlational research design, interlaced within each other, were embraced to reach that objective. 207 volunteer freshman students were sampled at the education faculty of a state university. A partially adapted survey was wielded as a data collection instrument. Based on the results of the descriptive and inferential statistics, while a large number of the respondents aimed to pass the English course, almost half of them did not ever exert any effort to learn the English language. The participants displayed negative attitude in all attitudinal components substantiating monolithic attitudinal concept. Male students displayed more favorable dispositions than females. Teacher learners getting education at the Turkish Language Education department bore more approving attitude than the other departments. The participants graduated from general high schools unexpectedly embraced more favorable dispositions. The participants’ goals and hours for studying English had very little share on their attitude. Hinged upon the results, a number of suggestions were forwarded to educators to promote approving dispositions in the language learners and teacher learners.