Teacher students' attitudes towards English in a multilingual context. A longitudinal study

Students' language attitudes have long been considered important in the process of language learning, as they may impact academic achievement, and educators' attitudes towards languages have also been studied for they may play a paramount role in shaping students' attitudes. Hence, examining the development of teacher students' language attitudes will help to better fine tune the specific teacher education programme. The aim of the present study was to analyse the development of primary teacher student attitudes towards English and to investigate the impact of personal, contextual and educational variables on those attitudes. This longitudinal study was carried out with 100 undergraduates enrolled in a degree programme in trilingual Primary Teacher Education. Our results show that self-perception of English competence level and specialist areas are the decisive variables. It was also revealed that these primary teacher students do not consider English a threat to their own identity. Furthermore, our findings suggest the need to go beyond students' personal and contextual data to examine the particular educational context in greater depth, specifically, the language and educational policy being implemented, as both of these may impact students' attitudes towards the target language.