Students' motivation and attitudes towards learning a second language : -British and Swedish students' points of view

Abstract: This paper is a study within the general area of Second Language Acquisition (SLA), focusing on second language learning in formal (class room) settings. The main questions discussed in this essay are firstly, whether social factors matter while learning a second language, secondly, to what extent attitudes towards the second language matter and thirdly, what attitudes students actually have towards studying a second language. The paper compares both students and teachers in the UK and Sweden. To be able to make this comparison I travelled to the UK and followed a class at the University of Wolverhampton that study Swedish. This paper has benefited from both quantitative and qualitative methods. The quantitative part consists of a questionnaire that was handed out to the students in both England and Sweden. For the qualitative part of my research I made use of the structured interview form, which is a method that has a compact nest of questions and where the sequence of questions is decided before the interview. I interviewed two students and one teacher in each of the countries that this paper covers. The social factors that this paper recognises are age, gender, social class and ethnic identity. Furthermore, the essay examines the impact of students’ motivation and attitudes while studying and learning a new language. It has been demonstrated that motivation has a major role to play while learning a second language. It can be argued that the more motivated students are the more and better they will learn. According the students in question their opinions are that you have to have a good teacher while learning languages, i.e. a teacher that can encourage you and make you develop. On the other hand the teachers in question said that the students must be interested in learning second languages otherwise it is pointless since they will not develop. The findings of the present paper are analysed in the light of previous research published in this field.