Students' attitudes towards English in the Turkish secondary school context

The present study was carried out in Diyarbakır, Ergani in the second semester of the 2019-2020 education year with the participation of 353 secondary school students. This study firstly aimed to analyse secondary school students' attitudes towards English and towards learning English. This study then sought to investigate whether gender, parents' level of education, parents' employment status, weekly English lesson hours, and grade level had an impact on students' attitudes. In line with the aims, both a demographic information form and the Smiley Face Language Attitude Scale (Çelik, 2015) were employed to gather data. The data were analysed via the SPSS programme. As a first step, descriptive analyses were made, and the demographic variables of the students were distributed in the frequency tables. Then, the frequency distributions of the students' responses to the attitude scale were determined. Independent samples t-test and ANOVA were employed to analyse students' attitudes in accordance with their demographic variables. According to the results, students' attitudes towards English and learning English were positive. Nevertheless, female students had more positive attitudes than male students. In addition, English intensive class students' attitudes were more positive than regular class students' attitudes. Moreover, fifth grade students' attitudes were found to be more positive than sixth and seventh grade students' attitudes. Also, the education level of father and students' attitudes were found to be related. On the other hand, no relationship was found between the education level of mother and students' attitudes. Likewise, no relationship was found between the employment status of parents and students' attitudes.