Acceso usuarios
David Lasagabaster Herrarte
Although the presence of three (or even more) languages in the curriculum is an expanding phenomenon in Europe, brought about by the concurrence of regionalisation and internationalisation, the number of research studies tackling the analysis of attitudes towards multilingualism is very limited. By examining the attitudes towards Basque, Spanish and English held by Basque university students, this study strives to help correct this deficiency. It takes Cook (1999), Grosjean (2000) and Herdina and Jessner's (2002) multilingual (rather than monolingual) parameters as a basis for the design of the questionnaire on attitudes. In this way, instead of questioning the respondents about each of their three languages independently, in the traditional fashion, these three languages are put forward as a unit. The participants are 1087 undergraduates whose mother tongue is taken into consideration when analysing their attitudes towards multilingualism. It was expected that the students' L1 would not exert such a significant effect on their attitudes in this multilingually focused questionnaire, in opposition to previous studies carried out in the Basque context. In those studies, attitudes towards each of the three languages were analysed independently, which led the L1 to play a paramount and significant role in the participants' linguistic attitudes. If this hypothesis should be borne out, it will surely affect future questionnaire design.
