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ERIC EJ1137971: The Role of Attitudes in the Development of Russian as a Foreign Language: A Retrospective Study PDF

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Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching Department of English Studies, Faculty of Pedagogy and Fine Arts, Adam Mickiewicz University, Kalisz SSLLT 7 (1). 2017. 149-167 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2017.7.1.8 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl The role of attitudes in the development of Russian as a foreign language: A retrospective study Szilvia Bátyi University of Pannonia, Veszprém, Hungary [email protected] Abstract The article reports the findings of a retrospective study which looked at Hun- garian learners’ attitudes towards Russian people, the Russian language and teachers of Russian. Mixed-methods sequential explanatory design (Ivankova, Creswell, & Stick, 2006) was applied which combines the collection and anal- ysis of quantitative and qualitative data in two consecutive phases. First per- son accounts turned out to be a useful and relevant resource for exploring individual differences in proficiency in Russian. Differences in attitudes appear to play a role in the developmental process, but to what extent this refers to attrition or non-acquisition is unclear. Keywords: attitude; motivation; retention; Russian; foreign language 1. Introduction The current literature (Szilágyiné, 2006; see also Dörnyei, Csizér, & Németh, 2006) suggests that Russian lessons were not effective in Hungarian schools, where it was taught as an obligatory subject from 1945 to 1988, mainly due to attitudinal factors towards the occupants. However, the period of occupation can be divided into three phases (Szilágyiné, 2006), and during the final phase, the students were probably less affected by the negative attitudes towards the Russian language and people. This study examines the attitude of the learners 149 Szilvia Bátyi in the final phase by means of a motivational survey and in-depth interviews. Russian language proficiency was ascertained by means of a lexical test (recog- nition and recall) tapping the number of words the participants knew from a set of words in Russian. The assumption was that many factors play a role in the lexical development (i.e., acquisition and attrition) of words. By means of a mixed-methods sequential explanatory design (Ivankova, Creswell, & Stick, 2006), the study explored the extent to which a negative attitude towards the speakers of the language may have played a role in the recall of Russian words in Russian as a foreign language. The main goals of this study were to measure the impact of attitude(s) on proficiency in Russian and to identify different factors contributing to low or high language retention by analysing first person accounts. 2. Teaching and learning Russian in Hungary Russian teaching in Hungary between 1945 and 1989 is considered by many peo- ple, including linguists (Dörnyei et al., 2006; Enyedi & Medgyes, 1998) and former learners and teachers of Russian, to have been a failure. It is thought that one of the main causes of this failure was the general negative attitude towards learning Russian; this was also the main assumption of this study. I supposed that among the measured variables, negative attitudes towards the language and the speakers of the target language (at that time the Russian “invaders”) would have the strong- est impact on the degree of language retention. Between 1944 and 1945 the Red Army invaded Hungary and drove out German soldiers and their allies from the country, an act referred to officially asliberation for 44 years. Due to several polit- ical events and agreements, Russian soldiers remained in Hungary until 1990, their number remaining at around 100,000 (Molnár, 1996). The relationship the citizens had with the soldiers changed from hatred to indifference during this period. The historical memory of Hungary is still processing the horrors of the first years of the invasion (1944/45) (see Pető, 2014), but as Ungváry (2002) notes, on an individual level there were those for whom the appearance of Soviet soldiers meant life, and others for whom it meant captivity, rape and uncertainty. For the majority of peo- ple the soldiers became almost invisible as they lived in their barracks functioning as a “state in the state” (Molnár, 1996). Thus, people had no or limited contact with the Russians in Hungary during the greater part of those 40 years. Russian was initially introduced to Hungarian schools as a non-compulsory subject and only at some levels of the education system. At that time there was no history of Russian teaching in Hungary; therefore, basic materials and other essen- tials were lacking. There were no trained teachers, no textbooks, no teaching aids and no Cyrillic letters available in the printing houses. Lendvai (2005) claims that Russian language teaching and learning failed due to the lack of appropriate methodology, 150 The role of attitudes in the development of Russian as a foreign language: A retrospective study real opportunity for practice and the resulting lack of interest and/or positive atti- tude towards the language, as evident from the following quote from Bognár (2008) exemplifying the Hungarian prejudice against Russian: Between the end of the WWII and 1989, Russian was the compulsory foreign lan- guage in schools in Hungary. Almost all students started learning it at the age of 10 in the fourth or the fifth grade of primary education and studied it for at least four years in primary school and another four years in secondary schools. Thus, Russian was the number one foreign language. For obvious reasons, teaching Russian to Hun- garians became synonymous with total failure in language education: after eight years of study of the language, the vast majority of Hungarians could hardly survive in Russian. A fine example of counter-motivation in education. (p. 6) This quote makes two basic assumptions that may not be valid: (a) that the teaching of Russian was a failure and (b) that this was due to a negative attitude. However, the compulsory nature of Russian may not have affected each period, school type, and level equally. Moreover, this assumption ignores the fact that some students were actually successful in acquiring the language to the extent that they were able to attend Soviet Union schools/universities, for both long and short term educational periods (Lendvai, 2005). However, there is little systematic research on Russian language teaching and learning in Hungary. One exception is Szilágyiné Hodossy Zsófia (2006), who compiled a comprehensive book on foreign language teaching in primary schools between 1945 and 1995 in Hungary. She divides the Russian period into three phases with different characteristics: · Pluralism (1944-1949) was characterized by the fact that besides Russian other languages were taught in schools. The goal of Russian teaching was to teach the culture of the neighbouring nations. The period was characterised by a lack of basic conditions (teachers, books, dictionaries, teaching aids) for teaching the language. · Centralisation (1949-1956) was characterized by the fact that no other foreign languages were taught in schools apart from Russian. The teacher training problem was seemingly solved by 7.5-month Russian training programs for teachers of other foreign languages, where, be- sides learning the language, they also had to gather knowledge about the culture, history, politics and geography of the Soviet Union. · Gradual liberalisation (1957-1988) was characterized by the fact that following the 1956 revolution restoration to previous times was impossible and gradu- ally other foreign languages began to re-emerge in the educational system. In Russian teaching, ideology became less important, and there was an attempt to encourage students to use the language in real-life situations (Szilágyiné, 2006). As a result most of the students had pen pals in the Soviet Union. 151 Szilvia Bátyi The failure of 40 years of Russian teaching becomes clear from Vágó’s (2000) discussion of the main tendencies of foreign language teaching in Hun- gary during the 1980’s and 1990’s. As she claims, the declaration of free lan- guage choice in Hungary happened in a European context, where, in most coun- tries, it became clear that the main task of institutional education was to give answers to the global, regional and local challenges amongst which the devel- opment of communication competencies was of high priority. Foreign language knowledge, especially the knowledge of western languages, began to be valued in the Hungarian labour market, which created a need for its institutionalisation voiced by the parents (Vágó, 2000). This period was also characterised by the low level proficiency of the adult (older than 14 years) population; for example, in 1994 only 11.8% of adult Hungarians claimed to speak a foreign language, and 3.6% spoke two foreign languages besides the mother tongue (which is/was the European norm) (Terestyéni, 1995). According to Vágó (2000), these low results stem from a complete lack of motivation due to the long isolation of the country and the disinterest in the compulsory learning of Russian. She also claims that positive attitudes towards foreign language learning were formed in the 1980’s and stabilised in the 1990’s. In summary, some authors (e.g., Szilágyiné, 2006) stress the lack of appro- priate teaching conditions, such as the lack of teaching materials, as the main causes of failure. Others (e.g., Vágó, 2000) blame the low proficiency in Russian speaking among Hungarian citizens on the inefficiency of its teaching, the oblig- atory nature of the subject, a lack of interest, a lack of real-life situations in which the language might be used and the negative attitudes towards the speak- ers due to past experience. However, it is important to note that the claims are based on impressions, not on empirical findings. The present study tried to establish empirically what the attitudes of stu- dents learning Russian between 1958 and 1988 were and indirectly measure the impact of these attitudes on the development of lexical skills in Russian. 3. Attitudes and motivation in FL learning Attitudes and motivations are very complex, multidimensional constructs, which implies difficulties in their operationalisation. As Dörnyei et al. (2006) sug- gest, motivation is “intended to explain nothing less than the reasons for human behaviour. Because of this ambitious aim, there is no general consensus on the definition of the notion . . .” (p. 9). The concepts of attitude and motivation in the study of L2 learning often overlap and are in interaction with each other, given the fact that, for example, attitude towards the L2 community is a component of motivation. The idea of studying L2 attitudes and motivations by breaking them 152 The role of attitudes in the development of Russian as a foreign language: A retrospective study down into components, that is, attitudinal/motivational factors, comes from so- cial psychology. Gardner (1985) developed a questionnaire, the Attitude and Mo- tivational Test Battery (AMTB), which proved to be a powerful instrument for measuring attitudes and motivation of L2 and foreign language learners. A host of studies have grown out of Gardner’s tradition since then, many of them identifying other important factors (e.g., Kimura, Nakata, & Okumura, 2001; the intrinsic-instrumental-integrative motive). Dörnyei et al. (2006) in their longi- tudinal study (1993-2004) included items from existing instruments and com- bined them with Gardner’s general idea, extending the clusters with linguistic self- confidence, cultural interest, ethnolinguistic vitality, milieu. Vígh-Szabó (2015) mentions typological proximity between languages as a factor of high motivation. A difference between the original study by Gardner and Dörnyei et al.’s re- search is the presence/lack of the target language community in the vicinity of learners, that is, second language and foreign language settings. Gardner’s general idea with the AMTB was to study the situation where the L2 community (French Canadians) was present in the country; thus, it was not a typical “foreign language learning” situation. While in Hungary, as Dörnyei notes, a “foreign language learning situation was faced where students learnt languages as school subjects with very little (if any) direct contact with members of the L2 communities” (p. 10). Based on this discussion, Dörnyei et al.’s Language Disposition Questionnaire would appear to be the right choice to investigate Russian as a FL in Hungary; however, it measures real-time opinions and is therefore not suitable for a highly retrospective study. Fur- thermore, it focuses on generalizable motives rather than on situation-specific mo- tives (e.g., attitudes towards the L2 teacher). Therefore, Gardner’s AMTB may be a better instrument, especially when supplemented with personal interviews. Csillagh’s (2015) analysis of the Swiss context highlights important moti- vational factors in language learning, pointing out that “theoretical develop- ments have gradually moved away from the notion of a clear-cut division be- tween internal and external factors in favour of a more complex representation of L2 motivation” (p. 433). She found that different contextual elements play an important role in university students’ motivation and attitude. Language learn- ing does not happen in a vacuum, and the context is multi-layered including a linguistic, social, economic and political sphere. Dörnyei et al. (2006) refer to Russian teaching and learning in Hungary as dramatically ineffective: In 1979- 1982 not more than 2.9% of the Hungarian adult population spoke Russian, which decreased by 1994 to 1% (Terestyéni, as cited in Dörnyei et al., 2006). They claim that Hungarians were reluctant to learn Russian “because it repre- sented the oppressive power” (p. 4) and they also lacked positive language atti- tudes. However, as previously mentioned, there is no empirical evidence on lan- guage attitudes and motivation from the period. 153 Szilvia Bátyi 3.1. Measuring attitudes retrospectively There is little research on the accuracy of retrospective attitudinal data. Gutek (1978) presents data that shows that with the passing of years the accuracy of attitudes does not necessarily deteriorate. Her research shows that “the as- sumption that attitudes in the past are recalled less accurately over time is un- warranted” (p. 399). A review of the literature on the reliability of recall data (Dex, 1995) also shows that many types of retrospective data collection are ac- tually sufficiently reliable, though of course for validity purposes very specific data with clear points of reference are needed. 3.2. Measuring effectiveness of FL teaching retrospectively Foreign language learning through instruction requires a large amount of time, effort and devotion invested by both the students and teachers. Measuring the effectiveness of this effort retrospectively is not really possible, but it is possible to measure how much of the foreign language is retained. The assumption is that the better the language is taught, the more entrenched its forms are, and the bet- ter it is retained; but it is also a well-known phenomenon that if foreign language knowledge is not maintained (due to disuse or reduced input), it will start to de- cline. This phenomenon is called foreign language attrition, the non-pathological decrease of language skills in a language that had previously been learnt through instruction by an individual, a definition adapted from Köpke and Schmid (2004). In this study, we cannot be sure how much had been learned to begin with, but we will assume that common nouns that occurred in all the textbooks were at least seen by the participants and the more words are remembered at the time of the study, the fewer words were forgotten and the higher the profi- ciency is. In the remainder of this article, the term attrition will be used, but it should be interpreted as the combination of non-acquisition and attrition. The research question is whether there is a link between words remem- bered and attitude towards the Russian language or its people. 4. The study 4.1. Participants In this study 39 participants (29 females and 10 males) who had learnt Russian between 1958 and 1988, that is, the period called “gradual liberalisation,” were tested. Participants were recruited and selected by the snowball approach (Good- man, 1961). To help prevent the occurrence of any age effect, the age range of 154 The role of attitudes in the development of Russian as a foreign language: A retrospective study participants was limited to 40-56. Participants were divided into three age cate- gories (40-45: 9 participants, 46-50: 14 participants, and 51-56: 16 participants). The main criterion for selection was having had Russian as a mandatory subject before the dissolution of the Soviet Union (before the 1990s; see Bátyi, 2015). 4.2. Instruments and procedure Several data collection instruments were used in the study to collect both qual- itative and quantitative data: the AMTB, a short interview and a lexical test. 4.2.1. AMTB The participants were asked to fill in an adapted online version of the Attitude and Motivation Test Battery (AMTB). In the questionnaire, the participants were asked to indicate on a 7-point Likert scale to which extent they agreed with the statements. There were seven randomized clusters: 1. Attitude towards learning foreign languages (ATLFL) (e.g., “If I were vis- iting a foreign country, I would like to be able to speak the language of the people”), 2. Attitudes towards Russian people (ATRP) (e.g., “Russians are a very so- ciable, warm-hearted and creative people”), 3. Integrative orientation (INT.O) (e.g., “Studying Russian was important for me because it enabled me to better understand and appreciate Russian art and literature”), 4. Instrumental orientation (INST.O) (e.g., “Studying Russian was important to me because I thought it would someday be useful in getting a good job”), 5. Attitudes towards learning Russian (ATLR) (positively worded items and negatively worded items, e.g., “Russian was an important part of the school programme”; “Learning Russian was a waste of time”). 6. Anxiety in Russian class (Anx) (e.g., “I always felt that the other students spoke Russian better than I did”). 7. Attitudes towards the teacher (ATT), which included positive and nega- tive features (e.g., “friendly-unfriendly,” “organised-disorganised”); un- like other parts of the questionnaire, participants had to indicate on a 6- point Likert scale to what extent the positive or negative adjective char- acterised their teacher. Table 1 shows Cronbach’sa and the mean for each cluster. 155 Szilvia Bátyi Table 1 Reliability measures and means for the clusters ATLFL ATRP INT.O INST.O ATLR (pos)ATLR (neg) ANX ATT Cronbach’sa .773 .928 .887 .571 .898 .914 .925 .912 Mean 5.800 4.600 3.900 3.500 4.700 3.000 2.700 5.800 4.2.2. The interview The interview, as a complementary instrument, helped to “put flesh on the quanti- tative bones” (Singleton & Pfenninger, 2015, p. 12). While in the questionnaire atti- tude was operationalized by closed statements, the interview with the same ques- tions elicited more detailed answers, which provided a degree of triangulation. 4.2.3. The lexical test One hundred words were chosen to test participants’ lexical knowledge. The stimulus words were selected from books that were used at the time of the lan- guage learning (e.g., Hlavács & Rédey, 1969; Kecskés, 1986; Szilágyi & Oszipova, 1989). It was important that the selected words appear in the word lists of most of these books. Only nouns were selected, and they were categorised into the following groups: people (e.g., boy, grandmother), places (e.g., house, shop), school-related (e.g., pen, desk), animals (e.g., dog, elephant), food and drink (e.g., milk,bread), body (e.g.,hair,head), nature (e.g.,air,tree), abstract (e.g., peace, song). To avoid a trigger effect, each level (recall and recognition) con- tained the same number from each category in a randomised order (Bátyi, 2017). Both on the recall and recognition level, 50 nouns were used as stimuli. On the recall level, participants were asked to translate a given word from Hun- garian to Russian, and on the recognition level, from Russian to Hungarian. 4.3. Design and analyses The results of the lexical test served as the dependent variable. For such a com- plex construct as foreign language non-acquisition or attrition, it is important to be careful when drawing conclusions as predefined variables may not always fully explain variations. For this reason, I opted for a mixed-methods sequential explanatory design, which implies “collecting and analysing quantitative and then qualitative data in two consecutive phases within one study” (Ivankova et al., 2006). After the group level analysis, I looked at the individual data to find patterns in the quantitative and qualitative data. As a result of this approach, it was possible to put the participants into four categories or learner profiles. 156 The role of attitudes in the development of Russian as a foreign language: A retrospective study As for the quantitative analyses an independent t test was used to com- pare the number of successfully retrieved words on the recall and the recogni- tion level. A multivariate regression analysis was conducted to reveal the pre- dictor variables, that is, to what extent the independent variables predict lan- guage attrition and/or retention. From the dependent variables (recall and recognition) a composite variable was created (their correlation was very high: r = .955, p < .001). For this part of the analyses, the results of the AMTB were used as independent variables. Traditionally, contact with and use of the lan- guage since the onset of attrition is taken into account; however, in this case, only a few participants mentioned the fact that once or twice they had given directions in Russian, had had a short conversation in the language or had read Russian on signs, which is why this dimension could not be included in the anal- yses. The following variables (extralinguistic aspects) were chosen: age (3 levels, see Section 4.1), sex, language exposure (the number of years of studying Rus- sian), attitude towards Russian people (ATRP), attitude towards Russian lan- guage (ATLR) and attitude towards the teacher (ATT). In the case of ATLR and ATT, I wanted to create composite variables as both had positively worded and negatively worded items. The correlation of the positive and negative compo- nents of the ATLR (r = -781,p < .001, N = 39) enabled me to create the composite variable (after item reversal). For the teacher questionnaire the correlation be- tween the two components was low (r = -.386,p < .005,N = 39), so I decided to include them separately: negative attitude towards the teacher (ATTneg) and positive attitude towards the teacher (ATTpos). 5. Results 5.1. Quantitative analyses Previous research (de Bot & Stoessel, 2000) suggests that participants recognise more words than they recall due to the fact that recognition and recall include different processes. The present results confirmed these findings: There was a significant difference between the two lexical test scores presented in Table 2: t(8) = -9.664, p < .001 Table 2 Summary of scores on the lexical test N M SD Min Max Recall 39 18.74 16.23 0 1 Recognition 39 26.26 16.30 50 50 157 Szilvia Bátyi It is also important to note that the Min-Max-value range is very wide. In order to better visualize the spread of individual results, the z-scores were cal- culated for each participant and are presented in Figure 2. 4 2 0 -2 -4 Figure 2 The spread of individual scores on the lexical test Table 3 shows the variables which have predictive power on the level of retention. 61.3% of the variance is explained by the attitude towards learning Russian (ATLR), number of years of studying, and sex. Table 3 Multiple stepwise regression analyses (questionnaire) Variable R R square AdjustedR square ATLR .691 .478 .464 ATLR/language exposure .773 .598 .576 ATLR/language exposure/sex .802 .643 .612 Note. ATLR = attitude towards learning Russian. 5.2. Learners’ profiles While the multiple regression analysis works best with reduced numbers of var- iables, the pattern-seeking analysis on the qualitative side can include all of the relevant variables. Learner profiles were created to enable detection of com- monalties among them in the interview data. To reduce the number of variables from the AMTB, only clusters that showed clear differences among participants were used. The findings demonstrated few dif- ferences among the participants on the following factors, which were almost all positive: attitude towards Russian people, attitude towards the teacher, and atti- tude towards learning foreign languages. Therefore, these factors were not in- cluded in determining the profiles, and four measures remained: attitude towards learning Russian (ATLR;r = -781,N = 39,p < .001), integrative and instrumental ori- entation (r = .725,p < .005,N = 39), anxiety, and the score on the lexical test. 158

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