Attitudes towards Trilingual Education in Kazakhstan: A Case Study

The research focused on teacher and student attitudes towards trilingual education and its implementation in Kazakhstan. In addition, the purpose of the study was to investigate attitudes towards multilingual situation in Kazakhstan. The present study was conducted in Nazarbayev Intellectual School that practices trilingual education by teaching subjects within three languages: Kazakh, Russian, and English. It also attempted to investigate if there is correlation between teachers’ and students’ attitudes. Finally, the study aimed to find out whether gender affects the students’ attitudes. In the study, qualitative and quantitative methods were implemented. The participants involved 110 students from 9th, 10th, and 11th grades and 10 teachers of science subjects. All of the participants were non-native English speakers. The study employed triangulation: questionnaire, teacher interviews, and classroom observations. The results revealed that participants have positive or at least, neutral attitudes towards trilingual education and multilingual situation in Kazakhstan. Generally, students demonstrated more positive attitudes than their teachers. However, no statistically significant differences were found between teachers’ and students’ attitudes. Moreover, gender did not have a considerable effect on attitudes towards trilingual education as well as multilingual education.