Identifying children's attitudes towards languages: construction and validation of the LANGattMini Scale

Language attitudes play a vital role in the way individuals and societies perceive, use and learn languages, and communicate with other cultures. They are formed in a specific political, ideological, and cultural context and change over time, which is why researchers focus on studying language attitudes of different age groups and also different cultures. The main aim of this paper was to design and validate an instrument (LANGattMini Scale) for identifying children's attitudes towards different languages and language diversity. In constructing the LANGattMini Scale, special attention was paid to methodological issues related to children's cognitive, communicative and social development, especially the form and length of the questionnaire, the writing process and the respondents' language level, memory capacity, and the wording of the questions. The LANGattMini Scale was pre-tested and its final version used in an online survey of 69 third grade pupils (aged 8/9) from three primary schools in Slovenia. The analysis of the validity and reliability results indicate that LANGattMini Scale is a useful and appropriate reference tool for further research on children's attitudes towards different languages and language diversity, in particular, foreign language learning motivation, foreign language attitudes and the role of significant others.