The ethnolinguistic identity of the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus' first-year college students and their attitudes towards the learning of English as a second language

Day by day teachers and professors have to deal with students' attitudes no matter what class they teach. English is not an exception. As a matter of fact, according to experts and to different studies that have been carried out on the Island, English has proved to be one of the subjects in which the attitudes of the students would vary greatly. On the other hand, the results of standardized tests administered on the Island show that the English scores of these tests seem to be getting lower.; Experts in the matter say that even when the Puerto Rican students want to learn English, there are few who get to be bilingual. Moreover, after more than one hundred years of North American presence in the Island, there is only around a 25% of bilinguals in Puerto Rico. For more than a century, this problem has acquired great proportions. Both, the first American authorities and the current Department of Education have tried to solve it with no apparent success.; The purpose of this study was to explore the attitudes of 1st year Puerto Rican college students towards the learning of the English language in relation to their ethnolinguistic identity. The importance of studying attitudes can be traced back to studies, even before the seventies, that state how attitudes will either inhibit or promote the learning of a language.; The study was a descriptive one, performed with a sample of two hundred nine first year students of the College of General Studies in the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus.; It was guided through two research questions: (1) What attitudes towards English as a second language do the University of Puerto Rico 1 st year students possess? (2) Is there a relationship between these students' attitudes towards ESL and their ethnolinguistic identity?; The students were picked by means of a convenience sample, after having made the appropriate arrangements with the professors of the College of General Studies who ceded time of their classes for the study. The students were tested during their English classes.; The instruments went through a validation process which not only included the aspect of using questionnaires that had been used for other researches, but also that of evaluating these same questionnaires with both a retrotranslation process and an Expert Judgement process. Afterwards, a pilot test was carried out with a group of first and second year students of both the UPR in Bayamon and the UIPR, Bayamon Campus, in order to detect any bias or difficulty previous to the real study.; To analyze and interpret the results, frequency counts and percents were run for both questionnaires and they were subsequently correlated by using Pearson. The expected correlation was not found between the two variables. Instead, according to the study, the students seemed to have both a positive attitude towards English as well as a healthy Ethnolinguistic vitality. Therefore, the correlation shown was, the strongest the ethnolinguistic identity, the more positive the attitude towards a second language. Further studies are recommended to continue improving the quality of ESL on the Island.