Attitudes toward English and its functions in Finland: A discourse‐analytic study

Abstract

With the second cognitive revolution, a new paradigm is emerging in (social) psychology: positivism is giving way to social constructionism. Consequently, this paper argues for a redefinition of terms and reconsideration of methodology in research on language attitudes. More specifically, it argues that mentalistic definitions of attitudes be replaced with social ones, and experimentation with the matched-guise technique with discourse-analytic research. These developments are illustrated with a qualitative study concerning the attitudes or views held by college students towards English in Finland, based on their written responses to a letter-to-the-Editor that basically argued against the use of English in the country for a number of reasons.

Exploring language attitudes in ELF research: Contrasting approaches in conversation

“…However, this body of work has been criticised from a social psychological perspective because of an apparent disregard of an individual's dispositional concepts on which his/her mental processing may be based (e.g., Hyrkstedt and Kalaja 1998;Liebscher and Dailey-O'Cain 2009;Schwarz 2012) or an unbalanced focus on processing itself (e.g., Cargile et al 1994;Conrey and Smith 2007;Gawronski and Bodenhausen 2011).…”

From attitudes to social representations in endangered language research: towards an interactional framework

“…In this light, searching for an idealised 'true' attitude is simply not possible. In approaches departing from traditional attitude studies, researchers have opted to study different theoretical concepts, rather than attitudes, including 'evaluative practices' (Hyrkstedt and Kalaja 1998;Potter and Wetherell 1987), 'evaluative activities' (Soukup 2012), 'attitudes as constructions' (Schwarz and Bohner 2001), 'attitudes-in-interaction' (Liebscher and Dailey-O'Cain 2009) and 'language ideologies' or 'linguistic ideologies' (Schieffelin, Woolard, and Kroskrity 1998). These researchers all generally reject positivistic theories and methods to attitude research, but they do not adopt precisely the same theoretical framework.…”

Kuwaitis’ Attitudes towards Vehicles’ Stickers in Kuwait: A Sociolinguistic Investigation

“…These approaches are the 'content analysis' approach (Knobs and van Hout 1988, p. 6), direct approach and indirect approach (Garret, 2010). The direct approach has been the most dominant paradigm in language attitudes' studies (see for example, Hyrkestedt & Kalaja, 1998;Soleimani & Hanafi, 2013;Dashti, 2016Dashti, , 2014Dashti, , 2008). …”