Investigating Language Attitudes among Bilingual Egyptian University Students | ||
| CDELT Occasional Papers in the Development of English Education | ||
| Article 4, Volume 65, Issue 1, July 2018, Pages 71-126 PDF (1.02 M) | ||
| Document Type: Original Article | ||
| DOI: 10.21608/opde.2018.106571 | ||
| Author | ||
| Nadia A. Shalaby Shalaby | ||
| Abstract | ||
| This study is an investigation of language attitudes of bilingual Egyptian university students enrolled in two universities in Cairo: Ain Shams University, a national university, and the German University in Cairo, a private one. The aim of the study was to investigate and compare the students’ attitudes towards Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (ECA), English and codeswitching. The study also sought to find out whether or not a correlation existed among severable variables in the study, the most important of which are the relationship between type of high school certificate (national vs. international) and attitudes to MSA, ECA, English, codeswitching, and towards pride in Egyptian and Arab identity. Data was collected from 223 students using three instruments: a writing task, a questionnaire, and focus group interviews. Results of the study suggest that while there are differences between the two groups of students in their attitudes to the codes under investigation, and also in their self-reported linguistic behavior, none of these differences were statistically significant except regarding attitude to codeswitching. GUC students had a much more positive attitude towards codeswitching, readily acknowledged practicing it and were more tolerant of it in the linguistic behavior of others. Results of the correlation tests suggest that there is a strong correlation between the type of high school education and a positive attitude to Arabic, but there was no correlation between the type of high school education and a positive attitude to English. Furthermore, there was no correlation between type of high school education and pride in Egyptian/Arab identity. | ||
| Keywords | ||
| Language attitudes; FusHa Arabic; MSA; Egyptian Colloquial Arabic; Franco-Arab; codeswitching | ||
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