A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of the degree"Licencié en langues et littérature anglaises"

RÉSUME,

The present study aims at investigating the nature of attitudes learners have towards the nature of attitude learners have towads the speaking skill in English language as well as factors which influence such attitudes. In fact, it is believed that nowadays' learners performance in the speaking skill tends to be bad. And this work will explore what are the reasons and factors behind such a bad performance. In order to explore those factors and find our their attitudes towards the speaking skill. I visited seven schools in the Provincial Education Directorate of Mwaro and the class of Second year post-fundamental languages section was my focus.To conduct this research some guiding research questions were used as: What is the nature of attutides that second year post-fundamental, Language section learners have towards speaking skill in English? Do the teachers' methods influence the learners' attitudes towards the speaking skill in English? Do learners' learners' attitudes vary according to the kind of speaking activity? My mùajor prediction was that second year post-fundamental learners have negative attitudes towards the speaking skill in English. I used teachers' and learners' questionnaires as well as classroom observation. The findings of this research made us conclude that learners of the second year post-fundamental, languages section have moderate positive attitudes towards the speaking skill in Engliss language? These attitudes are due to the up-to-date method of teaching, and also to the influence English language is constantly gaining around the world. At the end, I formulated some recommendations to the government, to the teachers and to the learners as well. The governùment was recommended to provide teachers and learners with enough and adequate teaching and learning material for a better teaching and learning environment. However, some problems were reported to hinder the required performance in the speaking skill namely: the lack of enough vocabulary items, the lack of sufficient reading books and the non-mastery of some grammatical structures.