The attitudes of L1-African language students towards the LOLT issue at Unisa

Abstract

Recent language policy developments at the University of South Africa (Unisa) indicate that the language attitudes of its students should be researched, particularly the attitudes of students who have an African language as their first language.

This study takes a first but solid step towards meeting this requirement. It conducts exploratory research into the nature of the relevant language attitudes and, based on the findings of this research, constructs an attitude scale that can be usefully employed in the measurement of such attitudes, both at Unisa and other tertiary institutions in South Africa.

In order to achieve its aims, the study places much emphasis on the use of proper methodology, in order to counteract the trend in much local language-attitude research of ignoring the complexity of language attitudes and avoiding methodologically sophisticated and rigorous statistical techniques that are equipped to accommodate such complexity.