Language Attitude

The present research was an attempt to shed more enlightening light on the current wave of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), which is gradually sweeping the traditional ideologies in the field of ELT. To that end, this study examined the Iranian teacher trainees’ attitude towards ELF. What makes the present research markedly different from the other language attitude studies is in the context of research, namely Iran, an underrepresented country in the literature concerning ELF. To collect the data, the researchers employed mixed methods design, using questionnaires and follow-up semi-structured interviews. The results indicated that many a participant maintained contradictory and ambivalent attitudes towards ELF-related issues. Whilst they appeared to be favorably inclined to agree with the statements pertaining to ELF, they did not display uniform attitudes about ELF-related issues in an in-depth analysis of the results. In fact, the results revealed an underlying tendency towards NS norms among the participants. Results of the study may have implications for teacher trainers and ELF researchers.

This article examines the impact of gender, age, and education on the attitudes of Kurdish speakers in Mahabad towards standard Persian and the Kurdish language. Since people’s emotions towards their own or others’ languages are related to their language attitudes, this important component plays a significant role in measuring success in language planning, learning speed, language selection and use, and predicting the extinction or sustainability of a language. The study’s statistical population consisted of 80 Kurdish-Persian bilinguals in Mahabad who were randomly selected. This study is situated within the theoretical framework of sociocognitive linguistics, and the research perspective was measured through an indirect method (matched-guise test). After distributing the questionnaire and conducting the matched-guise test, the collected data were analyzed. The results of the statistical analysis showed that the variables of gender, age, and education in Mahabad had no significant impact on the attitudes of bilingual Kurdish speakers towards standard Persian and the Kurdish language. The Kurdish speakers of Mahabad exhibited numerically positive attitude towards the standard Persian language compared to Kurdish language, but no significant difference in terms of any of the mentioned variables was observed between the two languages under study.