Üniversite öğrencilerinin İngilizce diline yönelik tutumlarının İngilizce dersindeki başarılarına etkileri: Bilecik Şeyh Edebali Üniversitesi örneği

The purpose of this study is to find out what attitudes university students hold towards English language in terms of cognitive, affective and behavioral aspects. The study also investigates whether there are any relationships between students' attitudes and their age, academic achievement, their fields of study, the high schools they graduated from, the year of study at the university, types of English courses and their aim for learning English language. In this mixed method research design study, Five-point Likert scale was used to collect quantitative data and semi-structured interviews conducted with 10 students were used to collect qualitative data. The sampling group for the study was 388 students who were enrolled in English courses at Bozüyük School of Applied Sciences and Bozüyük Vocational School of Bilecik Şeyh Edebali University in Turkey. Out of these 388 participants, 253 were females and 135 were males. The collected data was analyzed by SPSS program. The study revealed that participants generally hold positive attitudes towards English. Undergraduate level students had more positive attitudes in general compared to vocational school students' attitudes. Cognitive and affective attitudes of undergraduate level participants were statistically found to be higher than vocational school students' attitudes. Results suggested statistically meaningful differences between genders in terms of their cognitive and behavioral attitudes towards English. There was a statistically meaningful difference between fields of study, year of study, English courses the participants take, their academic achievement in these courses, their aims for learning English and their cognitive, affective and behavioral attitudes towards English. However, no meaningful difference was found between high school the participants graduated and their attitudes. The findings of this study may yield to further insights as to the importance of learner attitudes in English language learning. Keywords: Components of attitude, affective, behavioral, cognitive, language learning.