A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF ATTITUDES TOWARD LEARNING CHINESE AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE OF GRADES 3-4 STUDENTS AT AN INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL IN SAMUT PRAKARN, THAILAND

This study was conducted to investigate 63 Grade 3 and 66 Grade 4 students’ attitudes toward learning Chinese as a foreign language (in terms of affective, behavioral and cognitive components) at an international school in academic year 2018-2019 in Samut Prakarn, Thailand. It was designed as a quantitative and comparative study. An adopted version of The Attitude toward Learning Chinese as a Foreign Language Questionnaire by Abidin, Pour-Mohammadi and Alzwari (2012) was used for data collection. The questionnaire included three subscales (attitude in terms of affective component, attitude in terms of behavioral component and attitude in terms of cognitive component) to discover the students’ attitudes toward learning Chinese as a foreign language. The data collected from the 129 questionnaires were analyzed by means and standard deviations, a multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) and independent samples t-tests. These were used to determine whether there was a significant difference between Grades 3 and 4 students’ attitudes toward learning Chinese as a foreign language (in terms of affective component, behavioral component and cognitive component). The study suggested that there was a significant difference between Grades 3 and 4 students’ attitudes toward learning Chinese as a foreign language.