What’s English to You? : Employees' Attitudes and Experiences on English as a Working Language: Sense of Self-efficacy in an MNC in Finland

Abstract

In this thesis, I study the sense of self-efficacy and the attitudes and experiences of English as a working language of the employees of a Finnish branch of an MNC in the staffing and recruitment industry. This study aims to analyze whether the target groups’ responses on their attitudes and experiences correlate with their evaluations of their skills in English and support their sense of selfefficacy in English, whether there is any evident relation that can be distinguished between the respondents’ evaluations and outlooks, and whether these differ between the two individual target groups. This is a quantitative study, with the tool being a research survey. The survey gathers numerical data on the themes that look into the research questions’ topics and conclude the results and their analyses based on that data. The key results that emerge from this study are that the respondents’ overall have a strong sense of self-efficacy in English. This is mirrored between the respondents’ attitudes and experiences and their personal evaluations of their skills in English to be found in the phenomenon of intrinsic motivation. The respondents' positive experiences in using English professionally contribute to their intrinsic motivation stemming from a strong sense of self-efficacy, which then stimulates the translatorial activities as an everyday norm for their work. The comparison of responses between the two groups of operations and sales indicates that both groups exhibit relatively similar attitudes, experiences, and frequency of communication in English with only minor differences.