Attitudes of Foreign Language Students towards Environment

Key words: Environmental, environmental awareness, attitude, attitude scale ABSTRACT Researches conducted so far demonstrated that environmental pollution increases every passing day. Sustainable development and habitable future will only be possible with individuals sensitive towards environment. In developing awareness about environment in an individual, education has a great impact in addition the family and friends. While important studies are conducted in relation to environmental education and protection of environment in some countries, environment is almost ignored in human activities in the other countries. Wrong practices and developments in the surrounding environment indicate that the awareness towards environment is low in our country. At this point, our schools and teachers play an absolutely crucial role. This role does not only belong to the teachers of geography and biology courses where related topics are addressed. Teachers of the other branches should also possess an awareness concerning environment and convey this to their students in a way related to their branches. Foreign language teachers have a crucial role in raising environmental awareness in order to convey studies conducted in foreign countries and make comparisons between countries. To this end, foreign language teachers should have a good environmental awareness. It is beyond doubt that a teacher who does not have a positive attitude towards environment can not raise individuals with high environmental awareness. In this context, this study was conducted to investigate the attitudes of Foreign Language students towards environment. Within the scope of the study, a five-point likert type attitude scale developed by Bilgi (2007) and a questionnaire containing variables which are thought to affect attitudes towards environment were applied to freshmen and seniors studying at the Department of Foreign Languages of Education Faculty of Gazi University. The obtained data were analyzed by SPSS (Statistical Package Program for Social Sciences) and the impacts of sex, type of settlement where students lived for the most of his/her life, education statuses of parents and university education and class level, in particular, on the attitudes of Foreign Language students towards environment were examined