Proceedings of the 52nd International Academic Conference, Barcelona

ATTITUDES TOWARD LEARNING ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE AMONG IT STUDENTS AT THE FACULTY OF MATHEMATICS AND INFORMATICS, SOFIA UNIVERSITY

RADOSTINA MIHALEVA, RENI BUNEVA

Abstract:

The aim of this article is to highlight and summarize the attitudes of IT students at the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics at Sofia University towards learning English as a foreign language as well as their stereotypes of effective practices in acquiring the language. The purpose of this scientific study is to examine the learning-teaching process in details focusing on the students’ needs in order to find and implement new working patterns in foreign language teaching in this specific area and consequently raise the level of the English language knowledge in IT sphere of university students. The global world today requires a high level of foreign language acquisition, English in particular. Acquiring skills of reading, writing, listening and speaking a foreign language is a long-term process involving the efforts of both parties: students and teachers. According to the latest directives of the EU learning foreign languages is one of the main priorities nowadays. One of the EU's multilingualism issues of importance is for every European citizen to speak 2 languages in addition to their mother tongue. As English turns out to be a lingua franka of today’s politics, business and economy world its significance increases and thus learning English at higher institutions is a must. The present article focuses on identifying the problems which students and teachers face in their long joint ‘venture’ and on finding solutions based on the needs of the learners. Half of the students at the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics demonstrate a high level of General English so that they have no explicit interest in the foreign language. However, the other half of the students have an obvious need to raise their level of fluency. The main goal of the Faculty is to have a total number of students trained in General English, as well as computer terminology and business skills in English in the IT field. In order for the classroom learning process to be effective, it is necessary to take into account the preferences and needs of the students themselves. For the purpose of improving the quality of the training, a study was carried out. The article also presents summarized, detailed results of the two surveys, one at the beginning and one the end of the school year. The study was conducted among students of Bachelor’s degree in the following majors: Computer Sciences, Information Systems, Informatics, Mathematics and Informatics, Statistics, Software Engineering.

Keywords: IT, foreign languages, skills, Applied Linguistics, reading, writing, listening, speaking, use of English, grammar, knowledge

DOI: 10.20472/IAC.2019.052.043

PDF: Download