RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN GENDER AND STUDENTS' ATTITUDES TOWARDS LEARNING ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE

Gender is an important language learning variable. The purpose of this study was thus to examine the influence of
gender on the formation of language learning attitudes among college students. Hence, the study made use of Mixed
Methods Research (MMR). In specific, the design was an explanatory sequential mixed method involving
formulation of questions, data collection, data analysis, interpretation, and validation. The respondents of this
study were the students of Kwara State College of Education (Technical) Lafiagi, a technical-based college situated
in Edu Local Government Area of Kwara State of Nigeria. A sample of 265 students were taken for the
administration of the questionnaire. In the same vein, the study collected a sample of 27 students for the interview
protocol session being approximately 10% of the sample population used for the quantitative phase of data
collection. The study made use of an adopted questionnaire; Attitude towards Language (ATol) scale as used by
Eshghinejad (2016) based on Baker's (1992) LLA Model. It was found, among others that there was no significant
difference in the attitudes of both male and female students towards learning of English language since the p-value
(=0.641) was greater than 0.05. That is, the students' attitudes towards learning English were same and positive.
Hence, in the context of this study, gender had no overtly observed influence on the college students' attitudes
towards English language. In other words, attitude appeared to be gender-general rather than being genderspecific.
Therefore, both the male and female students had the same attitudes towards learning English. Also, the
study revealed that as gender did not have any significant influence on the overall attitude, there was no significant
difference in the attitudes of both male and female college students at the level of each of the components of
language learning attitudes. Based on this, it can be argued that while attitudes are important learning variable in
language learning, gender had effect on the attitude formation.