Attitudes Towards Languages” (AToL) Scale (original) (raw)

Attitudes Toward Language: A Review of Speaker-Evaluation Research and a General Process Model

Annals of the International Communication Association, 2001

Language attitudes are typically inferred from hearers' evaluative reactions to speech variations. Although they are central to human communication, their social scientific study has been reported mainly in journals outside of the communication discipline. This chapter first reviews the multidisciplinary work in the area that has looked to evaluations of speakers as a means of assessing language attitudes. Although this research has resulted in pragmatically interesting generalizations, more recent research and theorizing suggests that such generalizations may be limited due to assumptions and methodologies that neglect the complex process through which language attitudes reveal themselves. An emergent understanding of the speaker-evaluation process is discussed herein and represented by a recently developed model. Our assessment of the area concludes with suggested directions for future research. THE complexity of human communication has made researchers receptive to a multitude of voices, each encouraging the use of a different method or definition in its study. As a result, most communication scholars recognize that their endeavor is truly multidisciplinary and that they must often look outside the field in their attempts to understand phenomena that are central, and a fortiori those that are ancillary, to their study. Such is the case with language attitudes. Attitudes toward varieties of speech (i.e., dialects, accents, and styles) affect evaluations of many interpersonal, mass, organizational, and intercultural events. As humans develop both direct and indirect experience communicating with one another, they rely on this experience to navigate through future interactions. In our view, attitudes are a heuristic summary of experience; thus language attitudes are invoked every time interlocutors encounter a variety of speech that they have heard (or heard of) before. Despite the centrality of this process to nearly

Attitudes towards language variation in Tlemcen Speech Community

2007

This paper looks at the relationship between language and society from a social-psychological perspective, a line of exploration that has been of considerable importance to sociolinguistics. Indeed, research has shown that people"s attitudes towards a language variety reflect their views about the users of that variety, and the observation of their reactions can help us understand the association between social stereotypes and ways of speaking, as well as the resulting impact on their own linguistic behaviour. Based on an indirect technique of eliciting the attitudes of a number of respondents in the speech community of Tlemcen, our investigation reveals interesting results as to their reactions to the two high status languages, MSA and French, on the one hand, and the two low varieties co-existing in the community, Tlemcen Arabic and a "rural" form of Arabic.

Speaker Evaluation Measures of Language Attitudes: Evidence of Information-Processing Effects

Language Awareness, 2002

Language attitudes are often inferred from hearers' evaluative reactions to speech variations. However, the study of information processing suggests that speaker evaluations may also be sensitive to the conditions under which hearers develop impressions of speakers. If so, even greater caution should be exercised in the use of evaluations as a measure of language attitudes. In order to test the potential effect of information processing on speaker evaluations, an experiment was conducted in which hearers evaluated speakers under a condition of time constraint, and again under a condition representative of a typical language attitude study.

Language Attitudes in Sociolinguistic Research: A methodological perspective

Bouhout, 2018

This paper seeks to offer a methodological insight into the basic procedures that need to be followed in the investigation of language attitudes. This research endeavour, which is primarily meant to be a guide for beginning researchers in the area of sociolinguistics, focuses on various approaches that target observation 2 , such as the mentalist and behaviourist ones. The paper also addresses issues related to the most common methods of collecting data, namely questionnaires and interviews and the way they can be statistically analysed. Résumé Cet article vise à montrer un aperçu méthodologique des procédures de base qui doivent

THE IMPACT OF PERCEPTION AND EVALUATION OF LINGUISTIC COMPETENCE ON LANGUAGE ATTITUDES

Language attitudes, whether positive or negative, influence the language choices and practices of individual speakers. They furthermore reflect certain beliefs and dominant discourses about language varieties and language per se. In the case of minority languages, positive language attitudes may promote language maintenance, whereas negative language attitudes can lead to language shift. In this article multilingual adolescents’ language attitudes towards their home languages will be addressed. By conducting narrative interviews, not only insights into the speakers’experiences and attitudes were obtained, but also factors that contribute to the formation of language attitudes were exposed. Hence, the focus of this paper lies on the factor of linguistic competence, or rather, individual perception and evaluation of linguistic competence. This paper discusses the issue by providing examples, which illustrate that the perception of one’s own linguistic competence significantly influences language attitudes and consequently alters language practices.

Language attitudes: construct, measurement, and associations with language achievements

Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 2022

The article reports on the development and validation of a new scale for assessing attitudes towards multiple languages among multilingual students from Enshi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture, China. The Language Attitudes Scale-Student Form (LASS) was developed based on relevant theory and literature as well as interview data from four students and four language teachers. The LASS consists of 40 items, with ten measuring students' attitudes towards their dialect, ethnic (minority) language, Putonghua, and English, respectively. The LASS was validated among 5,237 students of seven schools from the elementary level to the tertiary level. The participants were mainly from Han (n 1 = 1,827) and two ethnic minority groups of Tujia (n 2 = 2,242) and Miao (n 3 = 886). The traditional triadic (cognition-affect-behaviour) model of language attitudes was generally supported across ethnic groups, languages, and educational levels. A series of validity tests and reliability tests were conducted, showing that the LASS was psychometrically sound. In addition, the predictive effects of language attitudes in self-perceived language proficiency and real language achievement were also confirmed to a large extent, highlighting the need to include language attitude as an important individual difference factor for language learning.

Soukup, Barbara. 2012. Current issues in the social psychological study of ‘language attitudes’: Constructionism, context, and the attitude-behavior link. Language and Linguistics Compass 6/4:212-224.

2012

Quantitative social psychological studies of 'language attitudes' (particularly speaker evaluation experiments using the 'matched-guise technique') are a popular area of research. But they have also been the subject of much criticism, especially from the perspective of social constructionism. This article focuses on two central points of debate: the issue of whether or not (language) attitudes should be regarded as stable mental entities, and the issue of the attitude-behavior link. Contrary to what has been suggested, adopting a constructionist perspective on these issues does not entail abandoning all quantitative methodology in favor of qualitative (discourse) analysis. Rather, it means conceptualizing speaker evaluation experiments as contextually situated 'communicative events'. Under such a recast, experiments can be usefully harnessed for the explication of sociolinguistic behavior such as strategic style-shifting. More generally, quantitative 'language attitude' research needs to take constructionist considerations into account in order to retain its scientific relevance today.