The Relationship Among Attitudes Toward Language Study, Cross-Cultural Attitudes, And Self-identity In China

Ongoing political and economical issues in recent years have reminded every ordinary citizen of the fact that we live in an increasingly globalized environment. With this fact, the need for educational institutions to improve cross-cultural attitudes among students is stronger than ever before. Language study is one of the most effective means of achieving the cross-cultural understanding and helps students develop a sense of being a‘‘world citizen’’. Greater attention therefore has been paid lately to the potential effect of language education on the improvement of cross-cultural awareness which demands us not only to know about different cultures, but also to know how the other culture views ourselves. Despite the speeding of globalization and importance of cross-cultural awareness, the issue of language study still remains to be a relatively unexplored research area in the field of intercultural communication. Inspired by the researches of Japanese scholar Sakuragi on relationship between attitudes toward language study and cross-cultural attitudes in United States in 2006 and in Japan in 2008 respectively, study of Gao Yihong et al. (2003) on motivation and self-identity change, and one the findings of Humphreys and Spratt’s (2008) research that the past learning experience has influence on language learners’motivation, the present study attempts to do a more comprehensive survey on relationship among attitudes toward language study, cross-cultural attitudes, and self-identity, combining with two related factors—overseas experience and past learning experience in order to see whether they would influence the relationship. To be specific, the present thesis will explore the following four research questions: (1) Are there significant correlations among attitudes towards language study, cross-cultural attitudes and self-identity? (2) Which attitudes (a general attitude, an integrative attitude, an instrumental attitude, self-identity, worldmindedness and social distance) are significantly correlated with attitudes toward English/Japanese/French respectively? (3) Which of the seven attitudes (a general attitude, an integrative attitude, an instrumental attitude, attitude toward English, self-identity, worldmindedness and social distance) does“past learning experience”significantly correlate with? (4) Whether overseas experience will influence the cross-cultural attitudes? And this study will finally raise possible pedagogic implications.Based on the similarities and differences of Chinese and Japanese educational backgrounds, this study used an amended version of Sakuragi’s questionnaire, with added new items about self-identity, past learning experience, and personal information. According to new participant selection standard, the survey was conducted in six universities of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Chongqing four cities, and participants were all junior students who major in English, Japanese, and French respectively. After eliminating the incomplete responses, there were altogether 603 participants’questionnaires available for analysis (211 English major, 201 Japanese major, and 191 French major).After the quantitative survey and qualitative analysis, the results indicate that (1) a general attitude toward language study is found to neither significantly correlate with self-identity nor with cross-culture attitude for Chinese sample; (2) the significant correlations between attitude toward different target languages and other attitudes are not the same; (3) past learning experience is so important that significantly correlates with most of the attitudes, including attitude toward English, an integrative attitude, an instrumental attitude, self-identity, and worldmindedness; (4) overseas experience has influence on social distance but not on worldmindedness. Finally, the following pedagogic suggestions are put forward: (1) people’s concept about language learning should be changed; (2) comparative teaching method could attract students’last interesting and raise cross-cultural awareness; (3) past experience weighs so much in language learning that we shouldn’t ignore its influence; (4) increase of the diversity of language taught in school may bring benefits to cross-cultural awareness.It is hoped that this thesis will pave some ways for later comers and further studies in the near future.