Extract 3: Data from the interview with the teacher
6.1 Phase One (Part One): English Learning before Coming to University
6 Student Enculturation into Academic Discourse: What the Data Shows
As already stated in the previous chapter, the theoretical model I developed to describe the process of student enculturation into the practices of academic discourse can be split into three distinct but overlapping phases: initial entry into the university and the beginning of the student’s studies, engagement with the first major writing assignments in different subjects, and the new status that the student achieves at the end of their first year. In this chapter these phases will be described using relevant extracts from the data to illustrate the key points in each part.
Table 10
The students’ EFL experience at school and in English-speaking countries
Student Type of school
Time spent in
English-speaking country?
Years of EFL study
Evaluation of school
EFL learning experience
EFL Writing experience at school
Richard (A1)
Secondary
vocational No 11 Negative Informal and formal letters, tests. No essay writing.
Krisztina (A2)
Secondary
grammar 10 months 13 - Not much – letters, short essays, stories, reviews.
Emily (A3)
Secondary
grammar 4 years 16 Negative Mainly letters, very few essays.
Steven (A4)
Secondary
grammar No 2 Negative Stories. No essays.
Vilmos (B1)
Secondary
grammar 2 months 13+ Negative Informal letters. Longer paper for graduation.
Zsuzsa
(B2) Secondary
grammar No 4 Positive Letters, short stories, tests. No essays.
Natalie (B3)
Secondary
grammar No 10 Mixed Informal letters, descriptions, stories. No essays.
Gergely (B4)
Secondary
grammar No 10 Negative
Formal and informal letters, descriptions, stories. No essays.
Fiona (B5)
Secondary grammar
About 3
years 1 -
Not much - formal and informal letters, film summary.
Brigi
(C1) Secondary
grammar No 8 Negative Formal and informal letters.
No essays.
Viki (C2)
Secondary grammar
3 week summer
school 14 -
Letters, compositions, stories.
OKTV* essay on Mrs Dalloway.
Sarah (C3)
Bilingual secondary
grammar No 5 Positive
Different paragraph types, 300-400 word argumentative essays, formal letters.
Erika (C4)
Secondary
grammar 6 months 5 Negative Formal and informal letters.
No compositions, no essays.
Estella (C5)
Secondary
grammar No 5 - Formal and informal letters,
essays about opinions and feelings, short stories Csenge
(C6)
Secondary
grammar No 4 Positive Formal and informal letters, stories, lots of short
compositions.
Jane (D1)
Secondary
grammar No 12 Positive Formal and informal letters, argumentative essays, essays on general topics.
Alice (D2)
Bilingual
secondary No 14 Positive Formal and informal letters, structures essays, short stories,
grammar jokes, notes and memos.
Tibor (D3)
Secondary
grammar 1 year 7-8 Negative Stories, informal letters, essays.
Monica (D4)
Bilingual secondary vocational
2 week summer
course
14 -
Formal and informal letters, stories, 300-400 word argumentative essays in last two years of secondary Julie
(D5)
Bilingual secondary
grammar/
Secondary grammar
No 7
Positive Negative
Formal and informal letters, guided compositions
(*OKTV stands for Országos Középiskolai Tanulmányi Verseny which can be translated as National Secondary School Academic Competition. It is a prestigious competition which offers automatic university entrance to the top 10 students in each category.)
This means that while some students have been studying English formally for more than 10 years, others have been studying for only half that time or less. Logically it could be expected that those students with the most learning experience will have a correspondingly greater proficiency in English, and generally this is what the data seems to show, with some exceptions. On the other hand, those students who have only learnt English at school for 5 years or less seem to experience much greater problems with accuracy in their language production, and they are aware of their weaknesses compared to the others, as will be seen.
However, a certain amount of caution is necessary as the quality of instruction is also very important. For instance, although Sarah only learnt English for 5 years at school, she went to a well-respected bilingual secondary grammar school, and did the so-called “zero” year, where all the classes are in English:
Well, the first year we had a so-called zero year. We had nearly no other subjects, just English. So we had 20 hours of English per week, every week. And 16 were really English and 4 of them were English Mathematics or English /?/ So there we learned just the language for these subjects. (Sarah, Int. 1, p. 1)
She had to pass a tough exam at the end of the zero year to decide if she could continue in the English track. Thus, although she only studied for 5 years, her study was intensive and she also reported having had good teachers. Sarah also did quite a lot of writing at school. When
she began studying at university, while she did experience problems with her punctuation, she was not amongst the students who were most anxious about their ability compared to others.
There were also examples of students who had studied English for more than 10 years but who had serious problems with grammar or other areas and this was largely, in the students own words, due to the poor quality of their English language instruction at their secondary school. For example, Richard, who studied English for 11 years before starting university, blamed his sketchy knowledge of English grammar on the failings of his English classes at secondary school:
So at my English classes at secondary school we had only these basic things. So I know what’s a verb and what’s a noun but I don’t really know, they didn’t really teach us the rules. Or maybe they tried to teach us but, well it depends on the teacher too.
So if he can keep up the interest and the attention, in that case he’s good, but this teacher couldn’t really handle this problem so… (Richard, Int. 6, p. 10)
Gergely told of attending a large mixed ability class in secondary school which he damned by faint praise in his characteristically understated way: “Some of them were sometimes fun.
Sometimes we had something interesting. Sometimes we had to work. (Laughs)” (Gergely, Int. 1, p. 2). In these classes there was not much writing and when it came to essay writing at university Gergely at first struggled with writing in a formal style: “Um, maybe, was, was the most difficult to get accustomed to this official and, and impersonal writing, because it’s not something which you do every day, it’s very academic” (Gergely, Int. 3, p. 1).
What these examples seem to show is that the quality of school learning is just as important as the quantity in terms of years spent studying. In this regard, the bilingual schools that give students the chance to do a zero year and then study subjects in English seem to be more effective. Three out of the four bilingual schools mentioned in this study were evaluated in strongly positive terms by the students who attended them, and the fourth, while not spoken of with much enthusiasm, did give the student the chance to experience British and American teachers and was acknowledged as giving her a good preparation for
studying English Literature when she had the chance to study several novels before her final bilingual English exam.
In contrast only three out of the 17 students who attended regular secondary grammar schools or secondary vocational schools gave their English classes or English teachers a positive evaluation, and ten of them gave negative accounts. The following is typical: “I had a lot of teachers. So they were always changing and it was awful. So I think that I couldn’t have succeeded so I went to an English course” (Brigi, Int. 1, p. 1). The frequent change of teachers is mentioned by several students, as are several other points. Here is a list of the most frequent ones:
- having many teachers of variable quality for short periods
- having teachers who either did not care about their students or, while they might care, were not effective teachers
- classes which were skewed towards certain skill areas (e.g., speaking) - having classes where the level was mixed
- having classes where there were many students who were not interested in learning - not learning much because the lessons were too basic
The low opinion that many students had of the value of their English classes was indicated by the number of them who stopped attending as soon as they passed their intermediate exams.
Almost a third of the students mentioned this.
Many of the students took an equivalent language exam to the advanced school leaving exam. Just over half of them mentioned going to a private tutor or a private language school to improve their English and to pass these important exams. This is yet another indication of the students’ view that their school classes were insufficient to help them pass the required advanced level English exam they needed to get into university.
6.1.2 Learning English outside school. In addition to going to a private tutor or a private school to help with exams, several of the students spoke of other ways of learning English. Three students, Richard, Steven, and Natalie attributed much of their English learning to watching television at home and learning from cartoons and films in English:
“Well actually I watched a lot of cartoons and movies and this way I learned English”
(Richard, Int. 1, p. 1).
Well actually I studied English and German as well from the television. . . . I listened to these stories and then I watched the television and watched other films and that’s how I managed to be in a bit higher level than the others. (Steven, Int. 1, p. 1)
“So I watch nowadays a lot of English television programmes too. And fairytales in English, and mangas. So I picked up a lot of English from the broad not just from the lessons”
(Natalie, Int. 1, p. 1). However, all three of these students experienced problems with poor accuracy and style in their writing and it seems likely that their unstructured way of learning English played a part in this. In fact, Richard and Steven both made this connection themselves, highlighting problems with grammar and writing in particular:
Because I learnt English this way; my grammar and my writing is not so good.
Usually I hear and I can talk in English, only if I have to write, I’m not sure if that sentence is quite good. It’s just a hunch, a feeling that this might be good. So this way I write. (Richard, Int. 1, p. 1)
So sometimes I think that I should learn [=study] more, I should learn more because since I’ve learned from television, the grammatical parts are not so well known for me.
And the essay writing is a bit hard for me but I try. But I don’t know if it will be enough. (Steven, Int. 1, p. 3)
As well as problems with accuracy, Natalie experienced considerable difficulty in her essays with style, frequently using an inappropriate informal style, which could also have been due to her learning from television.
The best way to learn a foreign language is usually thought to be by living among the native speakers in the target language country and several of the students had had a chance to do that for a shorter or a longer period of time. While Viki and Monica only went to a
summer school for a few weeks, six other students spent periods from two months to four years living and studying in an English speaking country, and these stays seemed to have had a strong effect on them. For Emily and Tibor it was during this time that they felt they really learnt the language, and for Tibor it was something of a Damascene conversion since he had not particularly enjoyed his English classes at school:
Before I went to Australia I learned English for four years at school. And sometimes I, so I wasn’t too serious. . . . But after I went to Australia I realised that I like this language so… . . . And I improved quickly comparing to my German skills. So after I came back I decided that I wanted to study English here. And not in any other universities because this is the best. (Tibor, Int. 1, p. 1)
Fiona was a special case. She had spent several years in America and had attended primary schooling there for three years. For this reason she only had to do one year of English in school when she returned to Hungary before passing a recognised advanced level exam.
However, although her spoken English was very good, she had problems with spelling and her lack of English classes before starting university may have exacerbated this problem.
Obviously, the opportunity to spend time in an English-speaking country is highly prized by the students – those who had not had the chance to do so were highly conscious of those who had, even when, like Alice, they had been studying English for a long time and had gone to a strong school which they evaluated positively:
FP: So that’s a big advantage to have.
Alice: Yes. Well not in speaking because it is true that I have met many native speakers but I’ve never been to a native speaking country and I can’t speak as fluently as they can.
FP: Some of the other students?
Alice: The others, yes. (Alice, Int.1, p. 1)
Several students expressed a desire to travel to an English speaking country after they graduated. However, working abroad may not always be the golden opportunity that students imagine, as Erika found out when she worked in the UK for six months:
I was an au pair but it wasn’t as good as I expected it to be. So I didn’t really have time to practice language. In the first 2 months or 3 months I could go in a language school, and that was OK, but after that I couldn’t and the family was not as friendly as I thought they would be. . . . I couldn’t improve so much and I had to work really hard, cleaning and babysitting and so on. . . . I tried to communicate with them but only the grandmother was as friendly [as] to speak to me or talk to me, but the others not. (Erika, Int. 1, pp. 1-2)
Another way of learning English mentioned by Vilmos was by speaking to a native-speaker on a regular basis. Vilmos comes from an ethnic Hungarian region in Serbia and the South African wife of a family friend, speaking neither Serbian nor Hungarian, was happy to speak in English with him. Unfortunately, while this is undoubtedly a very good way of improving target language speaking skills, which many of the students valued highly, it is also very rare to have such access to a suitable native speaker without travelling to their country.
Vilmos was also one of the two students who had experience of translating English into Hungarian in the voluntary work that he did in the year before he came to university:
And before starting university I wanted to do some voluntary work for a year. And the people in our network knew about this so I got a proposal to do some tasks for another international organisation which is based in England, but for the European office which is here, or was here in Györ. And . . . the work I did was, basically I translated the annual budget and record from English to Hungarian because the two, my bosses were French and Italian so they didn’t speak any Hungarian at all, and the national EU office only accepts Hungarian reports. And so they wrote the report in English and I had to translate it into Hungarian. (Vilmos, Int. 1, p. 2)
It was through doing this work that Vilmos was able to spend two months in England in the international office of the organisation, so although the work itself was tedious it proved to be a valuable learning experience. Tibor had a part-time job as a translator of short articles from English into Hungarian: “I’m translating articles for an Internet newspaper, two /?/
newspapers, and these articles [are] about cars, and the car industry” (Tibor, Int. 4, p. 1).
While this job meant that Tibor did not always spend as much time studying as he could have in his first year, it seems self-evident that the language practice involved in translation work
would help improve his proficiency in reading and writing, at the very least in terms of vocabulary knowledge.
Emily also had extensive experience of using English in her job working as a hostess in the restaurant of a large hotel for two years and then as a PR and Sales Manager in a hotel restaurant, which she continued to do on a part-time basis after enrolling at the university.
Before that she had worked in Finland as an au pair for a year, using English to communicate with the family she worked for. Finally, two of the students, Viki and Sarah had done a one year training course to be a tour guide before coming to university and one of the languages they were examined in was English.
6.1.3 English writing experience. As with their general English learning experience, so the English writing experience of the students differed greatly. At one end of the scale there were students such as Richard, Steven, Zsuzsa, and Erika who had little writing experience and had virtually no experience of writing essays by their own report. Many of the other students had done more writing but nearly all of it in the form of formal and informal letters and so-called short “compositions”. Csenge in particular had done a lot of this type of writing:
And at the beginning I think I was very bad at writing and because I wanted to correct that mistake or that thing I wanted to improve and I wrote a lot, a lot, a lot. Sometimes I remember that I wrote 4 or 5 compositions a day. And the next day the same, and I just went to my teacher and just “OK, here are my compositions” and the next day
“Here are my new compositions”, and she was very kind, I loved her very much, and she just corrected it during all the breaks and all the time. She said that sometimes that it’s too much and enough, but I just wrote, and wrote, and wrote and she corrected it and at the end she told that maybe we can write a novel or just give out a book with all the writings because I think it was very much but I think it was needed because I had to practice. And then at the end she told that when I wrote the test which was necessary to apply here she said, after that I called her with what happened and what was the task and so on, and she told me that ‘Oh, there couldn’t be any writing task what you cannot do’. But that’s fine. So I think, yes I like writing. (Csenge, Int. 1, p.
3)
The composition task seemed to be a form suited to the language exams the students had to pass:
FP: And what were these compositions like usually? What were they about?
Csenge: I don’t know. Sometimes they gave us the first sentence, or just a title, or just a topic, or… well I don’t know. These kinds of things.
FP: And how long did you write usually, or how much did you write?
Csenge: Usually I write more than enough. You know I hate this that you have to write between 100 and 110 words and because usually if that’s the rule I write 200 words and then I have to cross the half of the composition. But I think it was about 180 or 200 words but it depends on because they were short texts and longer. But sometimes, when I was practicing for an advanced level it was, I wrote in some case for 400 words. (Csenge, Int. 1, p.3)
However, being a practiced writer of compositions did not seem to be a good preparation for writing formal essays, probably due to the lack of a clear structure or formal requirements. Of course, it is dangerous to make sweeping judgements based on second hand reports, but it is certainly the case that those students with little or no experience of essay writing, even if they had been regular writers of compositions like Csenge had, were the ones who seemed to struggle the most when it came to writing their first essays at university. In fact, Csenge herself eventually avoided writing any major essay while she was at university, saying of the Linguistics essay, for example, “Can’t do that. I think I won’t” (Csenge, Int. 2, p. 9).
At the other end of the spectrum were those students who could already be described as experienced essay writers when they arrived at university. Foremost amongst these were the students who had attended bilingual schools, Sarah, Alice, and Monica. It was probably Sarah who had been given the most thorough preparation:
We always had a topic and then for two or three months we had argumentative essays for one of the topics. And then we read a lot of argumentative essays, so written by other persons, and then just look through them and try to find out if it’s good or not good. And then just correct them and then we had to write our own ones. Also every week one. Sometimes she gave us for example 10 titles and then we could choose eight and then she just gave the deadlines and we had to choose for every deadline one of these 10 topics. (Sarah, Int. 1, p. 2)
In fact, Sarah’s teacher managed to raise her weaker group in the zero year to the level of the other groups through her intensive teaching methods: