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The questionnaire asked the sample of students about their attitudes towards speakers of English. Ten items were listed and the same five-point Likert scale was used. Whilst all of the items generally indicated levels of positivity or negativity towards speakers of English, items 21, 25 and 29 also indicate the conative or readiness for action component in terms of how students act in relation to their thoughts, beliefs, feelings and emotions concerning native speakers. Items 22, 23, 28 and 30 are intended to gauge the affective element of attitude related to feelings and emotions about English speakers and whether they are viewed favourably or unfavourably. The remaining items, 24, 26 and 27, gauge the cognitive constituent of attitude linked to thoughts and beliefs about English speakers and whether these are favourable or unfavourable. As previously, the full profile of results for each item by category and faculty is provided in Appendix E. An overview of mean scores by faculty for Section D is presented in Table 11.

Table 11: Mean results for Section D

FACULTIES AT UNIVERSITY OF BENGHAZI

ECONOMICS ARTS LAW SCIENCE ENGINEERING MEDIC INE D CONATIVE/READINESS FOR ACTION

Q2 1 4.3423 3.627 4.138 4.3519 4.4902 4.4486 Q2 5 3.3604 2.758 3.428 3.3981 3.5294 3.3925 Q2 9 4.2613 3.763 4.226 4.3796 4.4412 4.4206 D AFFECTIVE Q2 2 2.1802 2.228 2.193 2.2407 1.9412 1.7850 Q2 3 3.9459 3.627 3.958 4.0278 3.8824 3.9813 Q2 8 4.3153 4.013 4.437 4.5370 4.3137 4.3925 Q3 0 3.5766 2.890 3.563 3.7130 3.7059 3.7757 D COGNITIVE Q2 4 1.9820 1.934 1.974 1.8241 1.9804 1.9159 Q2 3.6036 3.197 3.680 3.6944 3.5882 3.1402

Q2 7

3.3514 3.118 3.453 3.2778 3.3529 3.0935

In general terms, the overall picture with regard to attitudes towards speakers of English is one of positivity from the students, though perhaps not so strongly positive as their attitudes towards the language itself and to studying EFL. Once again, the results of the Arts faculty students also present marked differences in a number of categories.

With regard to the specific items, numbers 21 “I would like to meet native speakers of English and engage in conversations with them” and 29 “I would like to meet as many native speakers of English as possible” both focus on readiness to engage with native speakers but with a slightly different focus, with the former item specifying an underlying instrumental purpose for meeting English speakers i.e. to practise speaking skills. Interestingly, students appeared to be slightly less instrumentally oriented, rating the opportunity of simply meeting with large numbers of native speakers more positively than meeting English speakers for a specific purpose. Students from five of the faculties had no particularly strong feelings towards item 25 which explored whether they would like to live in an English-speaking country.

However, as previously mentioned, responses from Arts students to these items showed marked differences. For items 21 and 25 concerning contact with native speakers, nearly 20% did not wish to converse with native speakers and over 15% did not wish to meet native speakers; both of these percentages were considerably higher than for the other faculties. In addition, whereas nearly half of the students in each of the other faculties manifested strongly positive attitudes to both these items for Arts students this fell to about a third. The most striking difference came in responses to item 25 where 47% of the students expressed negative attitude towards living in an English-speaking country, more than double the percentages registered in this category for the other faculties.

Moving on to consider those items that are intended to gauge the affective element of attitude related to feelings and emotions about English speakers, either favourable or unfavourable, a similar distinction could be observed between the opinions expressed by Arts students and those of their counterparts in the other five faculties, although this was less marked for this group of items. Items 22 “I have an unfavourable attitude towards English speakers” and 23 “I like English speakers” indicate the general degree of

positivity/negativity of feelings towards native speakers of English and should also function as ‘mirror image’ statements (Gendall and Hoek 1990). It was interesting in this instance to see how positive or negative statements can influence participant responses, for whereas students showed high levels of negativity to item 22, their feelings of positivity were less strongly expressed for item 23. In the case of students in the Faculty of Medicine, they most strongly rejected item 23. However there was a striking difference in their ‘neutral’ responses to items 22 and 23. These showed 8.4% for the negative statement concerning native speakers of English as opposed to 26.2% for the positive one, demonstrating how opinions can be swayed by the wording of a questionnaire item.

Students from all faculties were generally positive about item 28 “I hope Libya will maintain good relations with English-speaking countries”. However a breakdown of the categories within each faculty shows another interesting distinction in the Arts faculty profile, where nearly 11% of the students had negative or strongly negative attitudes towards this statement. This percentage was double that for any of the other faculties. At the opposite end of the spectrum, considerably fewer Arts faculty students held strongly positive opinions towards this item.

Finally, in relation to item 30 “I like watching English-language films that reflect the culture of British and American societies” opinions of most students were somewhat positive towards this cultural form but there were also some substantial percentages of students who expressed no strong feelings at all, with over a fifth of the students choosing a “neutral” responses in the faculties of Economics, Law and Science. The most marked element within this category of responses regarding feelings and emotions about English speakers was observed in the negative responses of Arts faculty students with over 40% of the students disagreeing or strongly disagreeing with this statement. Once again this was at least double the negative responses recorded in all five of the other faculties.

The remaining questionnaire items, numbers 24 “I think English speakers are dishonest”, 26 “I think English speakers are well educated” and 27 “I think English speakers are sociable” were used to gauge the cognitive constituent of attitude linked to thoughts and beliefs about English speakers, either

category was much greater than it had been for any of the other questionnaire items. This probably reflects either the students’ reasoning that it was difficult to generalise on such issues or indicating that they felt they had insufficient knowledge to make any informed judgment on the topic. Again, however, a slight difference in this trend was observed when a negative statement was used, as in item 24, where there was a much more marked trend to express an opinion, which was overwhelmingly ‘disagree’ or ‘strongly disagree’.