(2024) Science and education, 4, 3-7. Odessa.

Yelyzaveta Baran,
PhD in Slav Linguistics
Associate Professor at the Department of Philology
Ferenc Rákóczi II Transcarpathian Hungarian
College of Higher Education
6, Kossuth Square, Berehove, Ukraine
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8395-5475
   

Ilona Huszti,
PhD in Language Pedagogy
Associate Professor at the Department of Philology
Ferenc Rákóczi II Transcarpathian Hungarian
College of Higher Education
6, Kossuth Square, Berehove, Ukraine
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1900-8112

Ilona Lechner,
PhD in Cognitive Linguistics
Associate Professor at the Department of Philology
Ferenc Rákóczi II Transcarpathian Hungarian
College of Higher Education
6, Kossuth Square, Berehove, Ukraine
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7235-6506

THE EFFECT OF THE WAR ON THE ATTITUDES OF COLLEGE STUDENTS TOWARDS LEARNING FOREIGN LANGUAGES

February 24th, 2022 marks a significant date in the modern history of Ukraine, bringing about a radical change in the lives of millions of people living in the country. This was the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war. A state of martial law was immediately introduced in the country, which remains in effect to this day. Education took place under extremely tense circumstances, first online, then in person at the Ferenc Rákóczi II Transcarpathian Hungarian College of Higher Education in Transcarpathia, the westernmost region of Ukraine. The students of the college were affected by daily air raid alerts, the stress of evacuating to shelters and continuing their studies there, as well as an average of 11-16-hour daily power outages during the time of our research. Therefore, the primary goal of our study was to gain insight into the students' emotional state and better understand their feelings about the war. We created an online questionnaire, which was completed by 194 students from 17 different programs at our college. The questionnaire included a block about students' feelings towards the war, listing 16 Likert-scale questions. The other block consisted of 18 Likert-type statements where students had to indicate how much they agreed or disagreed with them. These questions asked about students' attitudes towards foreign language learning (English and German) during the war. Therefore, the other main goal of the research was to find out how this difficult period affected their attitude towards language learning and what challenges they had to face. The results showed that in the initial stages of the first year of the war, students were quite worried about its outcome. However, they were optimistic and hopeful about the future of their country. In addition, the students did everything they could to cope with their academic tasks under these trying circumstances. On the other hand, some students admitted being demotivated. A positive finding of the research was that a significant proportion of students stated that the written feedback provided by teachers in Google Classroom about their academic performance had a clearly positive impact on them.

attitude, students, emotional state, foreign language learning, Transcarpathia, motivation, online education, optimism, teacher feedback, learning