Badanie podejścia do uczenia się języka trzeciego oraz jego kultury w polskim gimnazjum
Investigating the attitudes towards learning a third language and its culture in Polish junior high school

Author(s): Zuzanna Kiermasz
Subject(s): Foreign languages learning
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
Keywords: attitude towards language learning;L2;L3
Summary/Abstract: It is believed that attitudes to languages and culture tend to affect achievement in foreign language learning (Baker, 1997). Thus, this factor may be seen as crucial when it comes to the discrepancies in attainment in different languages learnt by the same students. Therefore, it seems vital to investigate variation in attitudes towards both learning L2 together with the approach to the L2 culture and the corresponding issues with respect to L3. Nevertheless, the general attitude towards learning languages needs to be taken into account as well. This article discusses the attitudes towards learning two pairs of languages, specifically: English as L2 and German as L3 and German as L2 and English as L3. A group of lower high school learners from Poland took part in the study and the data was gathered by means of questionnaires, which included both closed and open-ended questions. The study is based on and inspired by a similar survey by Simsek et al. (2007). The main objective of the present paper is to shed light on the well-known problem that students who are reasonably successful in learning L2 have a problem with studying L3 (Hufeisen & Neuner, 2004).

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