| As a global language,English has an increasing impact on the Chinese language.The contact between the two languages has resulted in a lot of changes in Chinese,among which English-origin letter words merits specific attention.Chinese letter words refer to a kind of words that are partly or completely formed by Latin letters,either Chinese pinyin or western letters.Previous studies on Chinese letter words mainly include definitions,categories,standardization,the incorporation of letter word being included into dictionary but there are few from the perspective of sociolinguistics,particularly few on language attitude to Chinese letter words.Language attitude is the evaluation of an individual or a group to a language or a language variety,which has three components including cognitive component,affective component and behavioral component.Language attitude is closely related to social factors,like gender,major,nationality and English proficiency.With language attitude,ecology of language and language identity as the theoretical foundation,this thesis is a tentative study of college students’ language attitude to English-origin letter words(ELW).A questionnaire was designed for collecting data among 400 students from North-Central University for Nationalities.The data were processed by SPSS.21.The study mainly focuses on three questions:(1)What language attitude to English-origin letter words do college students have?(2)What are the factors that influence college students’ language attitudes to English-origin letter words?(3)How to give theoretical explanations?Some major findings are concluded as follows:(1)On the whole,college students hold a positive attitude to ELW but different in cognitive,affective and behavioral attitude.Among the three components,behavioral attitude is the most active one,affective attitude the next and cognitive attitude the last.And their attitudes are influenced by gender,nationality and English competence.(2)Cognitive attitude: college students basically accept ELW.Students,who hold a positive evaluation to ELW,think that English-origin letter words are convenient and of great help in learning English,attracting people’s attention and enriching Chinese.Among the four social factors,gender difference and English proficiency have the most significant impact on cognitive attitude.(3)Affective attitude: near half students(46.2%)remain neutral on whether they like ELW or not;while over half of students(60.6%)agree to use letter words and hold the view that ELW should be widely used.English proficiency has great influence on students’ affective attitude to English-origin letter words.There is no significant difference found in gender,major and nationality.(4)Behavioral attitude: the majority of the students are willing to use ELW themselves and also accept other people to use them.Gender and nationality are the main influencing factors that have an impact on behavioral attitude.Besides,most students consider English-origin letter words as a better choice in their Chinese communication and online media is their first choice for using ELW.The study will be of help for better understanding the college students’ language attitude and their language choice;the findings are expected to be of value for Chinese language planning. |
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