STUDENTS’ ATTITUDE TOWARDS EFL LEARNING AND CRITICAL READING AS THE READING COMPETENCE COMPONENT

Abstract

The article is devoted to the research of students’ attitude towards learning English and critical reading as the reading competence component. The aim of this study is to define the students’ motives and attitude to learning English as well as to reading and completing tasks to the texts. The tasks of this paper are: 1) to carry out the constating experiment to find out the motives to learning English; 2) to research their reading culture of different sources of information; 3) to establish the students’ attitude towards reading tasks and critical reading tasks in particular.
42 Choreography students took part in the constating stage of an experimental study which included two questionnaires in writing and an oral interview. The first questionnaire aimed at defining the students’ attitude towards learning English and contained 13 items to mark the agreement with. The results of the questionnaire revealed the prevalence of instrumental motives over the integrative ones with communication with foreigners, travel and career being the most significant ones. Studying the English literature appeared to be the least valuable motive for students. The second questionnaire on frequency of reading different sources of information aimed at showing the students’ reading experience. The results demonstrated low frequency of reading books and the lack of interest in reading in general with the Internet sources having the highest mention and newspapers the lowest. The following interview carried out to find out the commonest and the most favorite reading tasks the students had to deal with at the English lessons revealed that they chose defining true/false statements and answering fact questions which do not usually require analytical skills. Expressing standpoints and opinion tasks were mentioned as the least favorite ones. The main reasons why the students found them complicated were stated as insufficient level of command of English vocabulary, the lack of critical reading skills and questioning the reliability of information.
Thus, the study showed that the students have poor experience in dealing with critical reading tasks which leads to the lack of curiosity while reading texts. Designing of a foreign texts critical reading training course to develop students’ general reading competence is considered to be perspective for the following research.