Las actitudes y cómo medirlas

Abstract

A lot of empirical research in Applied Linguistics require the elaboration and application of measurement instruments, thus demanding the challenge of dealing with their own theoretical field as well as with a foreign one indispensable to carry out a serious and rigorous investigation. The purpose of this paper is to share the experience of having designed an instrument to measure attitudes. The methodological data pretend to be exhaustive in order to allow the reader to understand and, eventually, reproduce the above mentioned experience. The data came from a study performed from 1996 to 2000 -a study which dealt with the possible relation between the attitudes towards the French culture held by Mexican students in public universities and the development of their interlanguage of French as a foreign language.