Investigating Students’ Attitudes towards Studying English at the College of Pharmacy

Abstract

The availability of some already developed physiological and mental abilities forms a source of assistance for the process of acquiring a language other than one's own. Such abilities cause the learners to consider, feel, and act in relation to the things or occurrences in their environment, including the learning of a new language. In other words, there are positive and negative attitudes toward such things or occurrences on the part of the learners, which are mostly determined by a set of relevant influential circumstances.

As a result, the current study aims to examine students' attitudes toward English as a foreign language taught to the first stage at the College of Pharmacy, University of Duhok. It hypothesizes that students exhibit unfavorable attitudes toward learning English. To test the hypotheses,  20-item questionnaire was constructed on the basis of the related literature and other relevant sources. The items focus on various aspects of learning English, such as the process of learning the language, advantages, learning of various linguistic skills, and factors affecting the learning process, to 91 2^nd year students. Analysis of the collected data show that students have noticeably positive attitudes toward learning English as a foreign language. As a result, the hypotheses are rejected as a student view the study of the subject English and its other relevant aspects of benefit for the timebeing and in the future.