Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Language and Ideologies 11
directly, but must be inferred from various forms of observable behavior.
Following the then-dominant research methods used in North American
social psychology, research on language attitudes has used surveys and
questionnaires administered to large groups of learners to identify patterns
of individual opinions and attributes correlated with success in language
learning, with success often measured by indicators such as course
grades. Dörnyei (2005) notes that initial work with the Attitude and
Motivation Test Battery (AMTB) developed by Gardner and subsequently
used by him and other collaborators around the world fell squarely within
the individual-difference paradigm of psychology. Indeed, in a recent
meta-analysis (Masgoret & Gardner, 2003), Gardner observes that, for the
fi rst two decades of its use, the AMTB was concerned principally with
individual differences, then the dominant concern of educational psychology,
and has been extended to include broader concerns. The survey methodology
elaborated by Gardner and colleagues has been refi ned in
subsequent studies and remains a useful source of insight into language
attitudes, which are both input to and refl ections of broader language
ideologies.
Standard survey methods continue to provide useful information about
speakers’ evaluations of the varieties of language to which they may be
exposed in the community, in schools or in both venues. The tradition of
accent evaluation within English-speaking communities goes back nearly
80 years in Great Britain and remains vital, attracting investigation by
scholars from several disciplines (Giles & Billings, 2004). A recent example
is the study by Coupland and Bishop (2007) investigating the attitudes of
informants around the United Kingdom to more than 30 accents in the
English they were likely to hear, including regional variants and varieties
infl uenced by other world languages. Findings indicated several intriguing
trends, among them a tendency for women to admire accents more
than men, for men to rate accents like their own relatively higher, for
younger respondents to be more tolerant of diverse varieties and for all
respondents to be less favorably disposed toward innovative urban
vernaculars.
Students’ attitudes toward their own languages as well as languages
encountered in the course of schooling have also stimulated research. Lai’s
(2005) timely study of Hong Kong secondary students’ attitudes toward
English, Cantonese (the local vernacular) and Putonghua (the newly
important, more standard form of Chinese that rose greatly in importance
after the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China) documents some of the
complexities of this contemporary multilingual context. Lai surveyed
more than 1000 students representing the fi rst group of secondary pupils
subject to the changed educational policies following political union of
Hong Kong with China. These policies had downplayed the importance
of English in favor of the use of Cantonese, the students’ mother tongue,