Exploring L2 University Students’ Attitudes toward English for Academic and Professional Purposes Course

L2 University Students’ Attitudes Toward English

Abstract

Communication Skills, a course taught in Ghanaian tertiary institutions, is tailored to make students proficient users of English for academic, professional, and other specific purposes. Over the years, the research landscape of the course in Ghana has largely covered areas including but not limited to error analysis, needs analysis, knowledge assessment, and trail trends analysis. This study investigates the attitudes of university students toward the study of Communication Skills from the tripartite components of attitude theory perspective: cognitive, affective, and behavioural. This quantitative study adopted a descriptive survey design and conveniently sampled first-year students from the Faculty of Social Sciences, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana, using an online questionnaire. The data has been analysed using descriptive statistics. The results show that, overall, first-years held positive attitudinal perceptions, feelings, and behaviours toward the study of Communication Skills. However, female first-year students showed comparatively better positive attitudes to the study of Communication Skills to that of their male counterparts. Nearly nine in ten of the students studied (87.5%) passed the course in the First Semester Examination. This suggests that the overall positive attitudes recorded may have contributed to this positive academic performance. We recommend that lecturers for the course take cognizance of students’ attitudes toward the course from time to time in order to adopt appropriate measures and instruction to achieve positive attitudes and academic performance.