Multilingual students' attitudes towards their own and other languages at the University of Stellenbosch and the University of the Western Cape

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis reports on research into the attitudes of multilingual students at the Universities of Stellenbosch and the Western Cape towards their mother tongues and other languages. With specific focus on attitudes towards English, Afrikaans, and Xhosa, the study aimed to establish in which domains these language attitudes are manifested, and to identify reasons for the attitudes observed. Upon completion of these components of the research, a comparison was drawn between the language attitudes reported by students of the two universities.In order to gain insight into the themes mentioned above, an online language attitude questionnaire was administered to 140 students from the two universities. Detailed analysis of this data indicates that the participants of this study display the most favourable attitudes towards English, followed by Afrikaans. Participants displayed the least favourable attitudes towards the indigenous languages, although none of the eleven official languages of South Africa were ranked unfavourably by a large percentage of the participants. The data further indicates that English is the preferred language in formal domains while the mother tongues of the participants are preferred in informal domains. Finally, despite the implementation of different language policies that appear to appeal to different linguistic loyalties, no significant differences were found when comparing the language attitudes of the students from the two universities.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University