Moroccan Female Rural Students’ Attitudes Towards Learning English

Abstract

Investigating female rural students’ attitudes towards learning English is a substantial need to identify EFL learners’ perception of English and provide language teachers and textbook designers with research evidence. For this reason, numerous studies have been conducted to determine the correlation between learners’ background and their language learning attitudes. However, very few research studies have targeted female rural students’ language attitude to determine whether there is a correlation between their socio-economic background and language attitude. Therefore, this study was conducted on a sample of 90 female rural students of two high schools located in two small Moroccan villages to identify whether they held a positive or negative attitude towards learning English and to specify the variables that shaped their attitudes. Participants were randomly selected and filled in a five likert scale questionnaire. The significant findings of the study include the participants’ preference to study English rather than other foreign languages at high school; they displayed high motivation and frequent classroom participation in the English class, strong desire to improve their English communicative competence, negative attitude towards the culture used in the English textbook, and positive social value to a person who speaks English. Thus, this study concluded that there was no correlation between female rural students’ socio-economic background and their positive attitude to study English.