Teacher Candidates' Attitudes towards Compulsory English Course at the Universities

Turkey, ID LLCE2016-272;     The purpose of this study is to determine the teacher candidates’ cognitive, affective, and behavioural attitudes towards the compulsory English courses and the relation of attitudes to such variables as gender, departments, the graduated high schools, goals and hours for studying English. The purely quantitative research design including cross-sectional survey and correlational method, interlaced within each other, was employed to achieve the objective. 207 volunteer freshman students were sampled at an education faculty of a university. A partially modified questionnaire, taken from another researcher with permission, was utilized as a data collection instrument. The findings were described and interpreted with the aid of executed descriptive and inferential statistics. According to the results, while most of the respondents aimed passing the English course, almost half of them did not ever put any effort to acquire English. The participants displayed negative cognitive, affective, and behavioural attitudes without any discrepancies among these components. Contrary to previous studies, male students displayed more favourable attitudes than females. Learners from Turkish Language Education department bore more approving attitudes than other departments. The participants graduated from general high schools unexpectedly embraced more favourable attitudes than other sorts of high schools. The participants’ goals and hours for studying English had very little share on their attitudes. As a suggestion, the language practitioners are advised to deem more on the individual differences and the affective factors besides dictating the grammatical structures of English to the learners and they are recommended to indoctrinate the precious worth of the acknowledgement of English to enhance favourable attitudes.

Keyword: Education Faculty, compulsory English course, the individual differences, motivation, attitudinal components