International students' attitudes toward L2-English classroom activities and language skills in the USA

Abstract

Pedagogical proponents of both communicative language teaching and the postmethod philosophy argue for the importance of considering learners' needs in classroom planning. This requires understanding learners' attitudes toward a variety of classroom realities. The present study reports on the attitudes of 131 adult, international learners of English, studying English for 20 hours a week in a US-based Intensive English Program. To investigate these learners' attitudes for classroom activities, I administered a questionnaire designed to measure attitudes toward various reading, writing, listening, speaking, and grammar activities. Factor analysis of the responses revealed four components: explicit grammar instruction activities, personal entertainment listening activities, interactive listening–speaking activities, and literacy activities. Learners across ages, genders, and course levels were largely homogeneous in their preferences for listening–speaking activities, and on several measures, learners reported liking listening or speaking activities more than writing activities; however, there were differences in preferences for literacy and explicit grammar activities. I argue that preferences concerning instructional activities can be explained based on learners' backgrounds, current learning context, and proficiency levels. In order to support the autonomy of learners while expanding their capabilities, educators should seek to understand and capitalize on learners' preferences.

Keywords:

• adult language learners
• autonomy
• curriculum
• ESL
• language attitudes
• language learning

Notes

1. Learners from two advanced classes were grouped together because post hoc t-tests confirmed that there were no statistical differences in their ACA (Field 2009).

2. Calculations based on age were run with 127 learners (97%) as four learners reported being over 18 but did not report their specific ages.

3. Though not every learner cast a total of 8 votes, only 11 learners cast no votes; there is no single characteristic that distinguishes these 11 learners from the other 120 learners. Since the voting bloc comes from two years, t-tests were first conducted to ensure that the groups’ data could be combined (Field 2009).

4. To test for interaction effects between gender and age, a Two-Way MANOVA was run. While there was a significant interaction between gender and age, there was no gain in explanatory power. Specifically, the affect of age alone had an explanatory power of 11% (η ²=0.11), as did the interaction of age with gender (η ²=0.11). Therefore, though there is an interaction, the strength of the differences seems to lie in the difference in attitudes by age. I focus on this difference in the analysis.