Exploratory study on EFL learners' attitudes towards English-only, motivation, proficiency

Abstract

This presentation reports on preliminary findings from an exploratory study on Korean undergraduate EFL students’ attitudes towards English-only instruction and first language use in their English classes. It also aims to investigate into relationships between their attitudes towards teachers’ medium of instruction, motivation, and English speaking proficiency. To this end, the authors recruited 212 first-year and 154 second-year undergraduate EFL learners in South Korea, who were respectively registered in English Reading and Conversation classes. All participants completed the questionnaire based on Likert-scale and open-ended items, and the second-year students from conversation classes also took computerized English speaking tests. Preliminary findings show that, while the second-year students were more favorably oriented towards English-only instruction, their motivation for learning English and attitudes towards English learning was not necessarily higher than their first-year counterparts, despite the fact that they had been exposed to one month English immersion program and one semester of English conversation course by the time of the study. On the other hand, for these second-year students, their perceptions of English-only instruction were found to be moderately correlated with attitudes towards English learning and their motivation, and weakly correlated with speaking proficiency.