Orientations and Attitude of Iranian University Student's to English Language Acquisition

The main objective was to analyze and determine how various psychological and social factors in foreign language acquisition apply to Iranian students. This study is based on Gardener & Lambert’s work. Motivation and attitudes are undoubtedly major factors in foreign learning success and has been extensively investigated. Attitude is defined as a disposition to respond favorably or unfavorably to an object, person, institution, or event. Motivation, on the other hand refers to the combination of efforts plus desire to achieve the goal of learning plus favorable attitudes towards learning the languages. Gardener & Lambert first made the famous distinction between two types of motivation, instrumental and integrative. A total of 400 university students participated. For obvious reasons, university students were chosen. Children, especially in school, are more ambivalent in regards to job objectives. Furthermore, they may not have a genuine interest in acculturation. The questionnaire given to students was developed in English, then translated into Persian and consisted of the two items: questions eliciting demographic data and a set of attitudes and orientations scales. The number of respondents reporting a middle level of proficiency was striking. The students were found to be both instrumentally and integratively oriented in English-language learning task. In addition, the results showed that instrumental orientation is a significant predictor for the integrative orientation of the selected sample and it explained 15% of the total variance of integrative orientation. Overall, the respondents showed modestly favorable attitudes toward learning English and have positive attitudes towards foreign languages learning. The students showed a moderate motivation and desire to learn English. Finally, there were positive and significant correlations between psychological and social factors and student's self-rated proficiency in English marks and orientation toward learning English.