ATTITUDE TOWARDS ENGLISH IN HIGHER EDUCACTION STUDENTS

The main purpose of this research was to determine university students' attitude towards English as foreign language. The epistemological option was based on a qualitative approach with an interpretative phenomenological methodology. The study units, intentionally selected, were constituted by three students of Hospitality Services career from the Instituto Universitario de Tecnologia del Estado Trujillo Extensin Bocono and three students of Hotel Management career of the Instituto Universitario de Tecnologia de Ejido. Information was collected by an in-depth oneon-one interview and by an interview guide in order to investigate about the world lived by the students. This guide was assured by the validity and reliability tests made by Linguistics and qualitative research experts. Triangulation was applied comparing the information given by key students, the theoretical guidelines and the position assumed by the researcher of this study. The beliefs about language and the different learning elements led to elaborate particular structures and a general structure, in order to discover and comprehend the attitude of the study units towards English learning from their vivential realities. It was concluded that an approaching attitude was observed from the affective and cognitive level. Instead, an unreliable attitude towards language learning is seen from the behavioral level, since students do not achieve the English communicative competence. The expressed causal attribution is based on internality and externality factors. Furthermore, bipolarity, unipolarity and attitudinal ambivalence were discovered on the superior category of this research, which led to create consistent and inconsistent interattitudinal and intraattitudinal conditions. Finally, practical and constructivist guidelines were established in order to promote approaching attitudes towards the core of the attitude. As an added value, a methodology to carry out attitudinal researches in foreign languages and other areas was generated.