| Attitude "is a mental and neutral state of readiness, organized through experience, exerting a directive or dynamic influence upon the individuals' response to all objects and situations with which it is related" (Allport, 1954: 45). From this definition, we could see thatattitude plays a very important role in accounting for people's behavior, and thus attitude as a construct has occupied a very central position in social psychology for the better part of the century. Lambert and Gardner are the pioneers who first viewed the second language acquisition from social psychological perspectives. According to Lambert and Gardner, attitude toward the target group determines one's motivation for language learning, and in turn determines his second language proficiency.Since language attitude does not occur in a social vacuum, it is greatly affected by the social milieu. Ethnolinguistic vitality put forward by Giles and et al. (1977) tries to take the challenge of explaining language attitude by the social-structural framework. According to Giles et al. (1977), ethnolinguistic vitality plays an important role in determining people's language attitude, language behavior, and degrees of group identification. Following ethnolingustic vitality theory, American culture and language should enjoy higher ethnolinguistic vitality, and then American English might be evaluated as more favorable.Initiated by this theoretical impetus, the present research reviewed the previous research regarding the attitude towards American English and British English, and discovered that the research on this issue did not come to an agreement, and in particular, findings of the research in Europe seemed to contradict with those outside Europe. What's more, compared with the research designed to examine the attitude toward American English and British English in Europe, relatively less empirical research has been done outside Europe, let alone exploring learners' attitude toward the antecedent cultures and consequent results of the attitude on their behavior in the use of English. Furthermore, the previous research has some limitations in research methods for adopting just one single method to measure language and cultural attitude. Based on this, the present study intends to probe into the following questions: 1) Has the higher ethnolinguistic vitality of American culture led Chinese learners to perceive American English more positively? 2) Has the higher ethnolinguistic vitality of Americanculture has led them to more prefer American culture? 2) Is there any relationship between the learners' language attitude and cultural attitude? 3) Does their language behavior correlate with their language attitude? We tries to answer these questions by taking Chinese normal university English major students as our subjects, adopting the verbal guise technique to elicit their perception of American and British accents and using self-report questionnaire to investigate their cultural and language attitude, and finally utilizing a reading test to reveal their pronunciation.The research yields the following findings: 1) American English has replaced British English to be the most prestigious variety of English. The Chinese learners evaluated theAmerican speaker the highest among the three speakers across the three dimensions, and the majority of them self-reported that they aimed at American English as well. 2) Attitude toward American culture and British culture is rather complex. The majority of the learners self-reported that they had preference for American culture. However, their evaluation of American culture was not significantly different from that of British culture. 3) Although the correlation between the evaluation of the American and British speakers and the evaluation of American and British cultures turned out to be uncorrelated, the learners' self-reported accent- preference seemed to be related to their self-reported culture-preference. 4) The pronunciation of the learners did not indicate a close link with their language... |
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