A atitude linguística dos alunos do ensino secundário de Macau em relação ao português e inglês

Abstract

As a region that highly values multi-lingual competence, Cantonese, Mandarin, English
and Portuguese play an indispensable role in Macao. Among these four languages, Chinese (with special reference to Cantonese) and Portuguese are the two official languages of Macao. This work intends to study the differences and similarities of students’ attitudes towards Portuguese and English, and mainly analyzes the factors that may influence students’ linguistic attitudes. To achieve the above objectives, this work was conducted through a questionnaire with a total of 72 of eighth and ninth grade students from a local secondary school. The results showed that in the self-assessment of questionnaire, the students’ integrative and instrumental attitudes towards Portuguese were more negative than those towards English. The variety of teaching methods, the experience of learning Portuguese in high school and the attitude of family members are important factors in determining students’ linguistic attitudes. The attitudes of peers and the content of the textbook also affect the linguistic attitudes of some students. Although the experience of learning Portuguese in secondary education had a positive impact on half of the students, it also had a negative impact on some students, reflecting that Portuguese lessons cannot guarantee students have a positive attitude towards Portuguese. This is reflected that in promoting the policy of Portuguese as a compulsory subject, teachers should pay more attention to students’ language attitudes, in order to change students’ language attitudes through different methods, so as to increase students’ motivation to learn Portuguese.

Date of Award	20 Dec 2022
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Rita Faria (Supervisor)