A Multilingual Portrait of Language Attitudes in Higher Education

This book provides an extended account of the significant role of language attitudes in language learning when dealing with multilingual contexts. The presence of more than two languages in the school curriculum is a common practice in many multilingual societies in Europe as is the case of the Valencian Community where three languages coexist: a minority language (Catalan), a majority language (Spanish) and a foreign language (English). Current studies show that positive attitudes towards a language lead to efficient language learning and teachers play a paramount role in the formation of learners' language attitudes. This book is therefore intended to widen our knowledge of prospective teachers' attitudes in a multilingual context, namely that of the Valencian community. In addition, the volume goes on to examine those factors which may determine linguistic attitudes towards languages. In so doing, 75 students from two different universities with a quite dissimilar context were analysed by means of an adapted version of Lasagabaster and Huguet's questionnaire (2007) on language attitudes. The book should be especially useful to language researchers and teachers.

Autorentext

Laura Portolés holds a BA in English Philology and a MA in ELT in Multilingual Contexts at the Universitat Jaume I (Spain). She is a PhD student and a member of LAELA research group. Her research interests include third language acquisition, affective factors, pragmatic development and multilingual education.