English Hegemony: Research On The Learning Attitude Of English Among Non-english Major College Students

English has double impacts on the world. As a social phenomenon, on one hand,English globalization has provided language tools for the development of the world; onthe other hand, the diffusion of English forms its hegemonic status. Meanwhile, all thesehave been paid much attention by the outstanding professors and experts at home andabroad. In view of the current development situation of English, there are two contrarypoints of view in the academia: one is to have supportive words for the Englishglobalization and has carried out wide and deep research from multiple angles. The otherone has a view that the spread of English lead to the formation of English hegemony.English has been a killer language.In China, especially, in the field of English language education, particularly, for thecollege students, English still plays a vital role. However, the English fever has beenheavily favored by Chinese scholars and experts in the context of globalization. Bycontrast, the voice of English hegemony in the west is always louder than that in China.With the reinforcing of English globalization, most of the scholars realized the existenceof English hegemony, and elaborated their views on the status and consequence of Englishhegemony in different angles and perspectives, but they have not paid enough attentions tothe attitude towards learning English and are not fully aware of the attitudes andperceptions of college students in the context of hegemony. As a matter of fact, to theauthor’s best knowledge, the related studies in China remain on the superficial way ofEnglish hegemony, which does not put too much energy on criticizing the adverse impactof English. There is no one stepping into the class and going into the students. Therefore,it is high time that we should attach the importance to the attitude towards English in thecontext of hegemony.Thus, the present study investigates the college students’ attitudes towards Englishhegemony based on the theory of Gramsci and post-Gramscian scholars. The researchobjects were212non-English majors’ college students in Hebei Province in form ofrandomly questionnaire investigation. The research instruments and methods were self-designed five-point Likert attitude questionnaire written in Chinese for a quantitativeresearch which has been analyzed reliability and validity of the scale and semi-structuresinterview for qualitative research. Two interview extracts will also be presented to providea more in-depth exploration into what the questionnaire responses might mean. By assisting the SPSS19.0, based on the different types of variables and seven dimensions,the author adopted the methods of descriptive statistics, t-value test and PearsonCorrelation analysis to analyze the four variables of gender, institutes, disciplines andgrade. All the data was tabulated directly and scientifically. Both extracts have beentranslated from Mandarin to English.There are three main findings of the study, at first, the mean of the respondents was3.32that was a little more than the score of the neutral attitude. Secondly, the respondentstotally realized that English takes over the higher status than any other language. Andthirdly, they have been fully aware of the instrumental value of English. They are notstubborn and bitterly opposed to change the fact. They are in kind of consent. But theyheld that they have no power to overthrow. The author hopes that the findings can bemeaningful for the future research. But there are still some limitations due to the limitedtime and length, the author has already done the research for only one college in Hebei,thus the scope of research can be expanded larger.