Learner Language Analysis
4. Results and discussion
In this section, I will analyse the level of proficiency, comparing the performance of the subgroups of immersion class – MID class, boys and girls.
Then, I will move onto the lexical and linguistic findings including length and statistics on word count, frequency analysis, range of vocabulary, typical vocabulary related errors and content. I will briefly touch upon the identity related statements, but I will not go into details about them in the present study.
4.1 Level of proficiency
Besides the overall language exam results (Lukácsi-Berkovics, 2015, p.162), I evaluated the written performances for this study separately. Based on my language examiner and teaching HSL experience, I considered most of the pupils’ texts to be at level of high standard, with wide range and high quality of vocabulary. In Table 1, I present the language proficiency results in the two subgroups.
Table 1. Level of proficiency in the immersion and MID groups level immersion group MID group
C1 5 0
B2 3 2
B1 2 2
A2 1 2
A1 0 1
The first column stands for the Common European Framework (CEFR, Council of Europe, 2001) levels, the second column indicates the immersion group, and the third column is for the MID group. Those whose overall level of proficiency was high had a wider range of vocabulary, too. By the written performances, I judged five participants to be C1 performers.
In my study, the C1 performer pupils were all from the immersion group.
Five students were B2 performers, three of them belonged to the immersion group and two to the MID class. Of the four B1 students, two were in the immersion class and two in the MID class. Out of the three A2 performers only one attended the immersion group and two were from the MID group. There
was only one student with an A1 result; she was the weakest performer in my previous study, as well. Immersion students clearly performed better than their peers from MID classes.
In Table 2, I compared the results of the girls and boys:
Table 2. Level of proficiency among boys and girls
level boys girls
C1 1 5
B2 4 1
B1 2 1
A2 2 1
A1 - 1
Girls tended to be higher achievers: five of them achieved the C1 level, whereas there was only one boy at this level. On the other hand, the B2 level achievers were mainly boys, four of them versus one girl. Two boys and one girl reached level B1, and the same was true for level A2. The only A1 performer was a girl.
4.2 Lexical and linguistic findings
The eighteen essays altogether contained 3,342 words, which means that an average essay was 184 words long (SD = 96.55). Figure 1 presents the length of the essays.
Figure 1. Essay length in words
The shortest essay was 37 words, the longest one had 438 words. A typical C1 level language exam usually requires writing an approximately 200-word text on a complex topic. Table 3 presents the most frequently used words in the text as analysed by Cobb’s (2002) frequency analysis tool.
37
108 110 110 112 121140 155162 168188 193 194210 220
317 336 438
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
Length
Table 3. The most frequent words
39. egyszerűsített simplified 6
40. ember person
The most frequent content words were nyelv [language] (N = 101), and kínai [Chinese] (N = 86). It is interesting to note the popularity of conjunctives like és [and] (N = 47), de [but] (N = 15) and mert [because] (N = 13). Another striking phenomenon was the high occurrence of complex words like sino-tibeti [Sino-Tibetan] (N = 8) or egyszerűsített [simplified] (N = 8).
The keywords of the texts were anyanyelv [mother tongue], nyelv [language], magyar [Hungarian], and kínai [Chinese]. As the topic of essays was about mother tongue, it is no wonder these words appeared in every text.
We can state that C1 level students all used varied expressions, complex sentences regarding lexical cohesion and idioms in their adequate place and form. It could be noticed that most of the B2 pupils strived to use varied vocabulary, although in some cases their choice of wording was rather incorrect.
B1 performers mostly avoided abstract arguments and tried to use simple vocabulary, although they could express themselves at ease in the field of their own opinion or experience. In this study, the students at level A2 could formulate very simple sentences with basic vocabulary, approaching the complex topic from a rather own experience based way. The only person at level A1 used very simple, isolated sentences with basic vocabulary, hardly related to the topic. In the next section, I will provide some examples.
Spelling and punctuation mistakes (“edés” instead of édes [sweet],
“mondgyák” instead of mondják [they say]) were the most typical vocabulary related errors. One of the most common mistakes was the issue of writing words together or separately (“az én anya nyelvemben” instead of az én anyanyelvemben [in my mother tongue], “esztmonta” instead of ezt mondta [he said that]), which is an issue for L1 users in Hungarian, as well. Further, using the wrong word or expression was typical but less frequent (“gyerekem […]
ebben az iskolában fogja újra lépni a gyerekkoromat instead of az én gyerekem is ebbe az iskolába fog járni, mint most én [my child will go to this school like I did].
4.3 Content
Regarding the content of the texts, I found one striking difference between the immersion group and the MID group. While the immersion students wrote more freely and frankly about their attitudes and feelings towards Chinese, Hungarian and English, the MID group students were rather objective and factual. The reason behind this phenomenon might be that the higher language proficiency in the immersion class allowed for smoother ways of expressing emotions.
Let me present some typical examples from both types of writings. A factual writing from the MID class:
A kínai nyelv körülbelül 1,7 milliárdan és körülbelül 5000 éves a története. És a kínai nyelvben van öt hangsúlly pedig az első hang, második hang, harmadik hang, negyedik hang és hangsúlytalan. Az írott pedig két fajtája van: Egyszerűsített és hagyományos kínai. A kínai nyelvtan kevés van. [Chinese is {spoken} by 1.7 billiard and it
has a history of 5000 years. And in Chinese there are 5 tones: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th and unstressed. And there are two types of its writing:
simplified and traditional. There isn’t much grammar in Chinese.].
Whereas, in the immersion group, these kinds of utterances are more common:
Szeretem az anyanyelvemet, szeretem használni, tanulmányozni, vagy éppen csak nézegetni is. A kínai kalligráfia világhírű. Nagyon nehéz nyelv, de pont az a nehézsége köti össze a világszerte utazó többmint 1,5 milliárd ember szívét. Én is ebbe a csoportba tartozom, ezért büszke vagyok származásomra és arra is, hogy ezt a gyönyörű nyelvet, mint anyanyelvem, tanulhatom még itt Magyarországon is.
[I love my mother tongue, I love studying it or just looking at it.
Chinese calligraphy is world famous. It is a very difficult language, but this difficulty bonds together the hearts of more than 1.5 billiard people all over the world. I belong to them, therefore I am proud of my heritage, and I am also proud that I can learn this beautiful language, my mother tongue, even here, in Hungary.]
4.4 Identity
The identity related analysis is still in progress, because I aim to collect more essays for a further study, focusing on the identity related statements. Here, I will present some examples from a number of texts to demonstrate how fruitful this field is. The following excerpts illustrate the bonding and positive attitude to both the heritage language and the host language.
Nehéz lenne kiválasztani melyik is az anyanyelvem. [It would be difficult to choose which is my mother tongue.]
A kínai a távoli hazám nyelve. [Chinese is the language of my faraway homeland.]
A kínai nyelv köti össze a lelkemet Kínával és így összeköti a kínai embereket is. [The Chinese language connects my soul with China and thus it connects the Chinese people with one another, as well.]
Szeretem az anyanyelveimet. [I love my mother tongues.]
4.5 Benefits and limitations
This study aimed to gain insight into how immigrant students with different levels of proficiency perform at a complex written task in the host country’s official language. One of the limitations of the study is its small scale; therefore, its results cannot be generalized beyond the sample. Nevertheless, it could serve as a basis of comparison to other learners of Hungarian as a second language.
The study also hoped to provide further information on what can be expected from students lexically and linguistically. However, further research is needed into the attitudinal and motivational aspects, as well.
5. Conclusion
The aim of this work-in-progress study was to investigate the language proficiency and typical lexical and linguistic patterns of Chinese immigrant students taking part in Hungarian education throughout their written performances. Attitude and motivational analysis is still in progress.
In my research, I collected eighteen essays of learner language in Hungarian as a second language from eighteen 14-year-old students taking part in bilingual and immersion education. The topic of the text was their mother tongue. The level of proficiency ranged from A1 to C1. The immersion group outperformed the MID group, just as the girls did better than the boys. The immersion group also wrote more freely about the topic than the MID class. A wide range of vocabulary was used in almost all the texts. The length of the essays was around 184 words on average, with the keywords being the most frequent content words. The most typical errors were spelling mistakes, errors regarding the issue of writing words together or separately, and concordance mistakes.
My previous and current findings strongly suggest that after one year, or in some cases even some more years of instruction, the students from immigrant families who are not in immersed classes still might lack the necessary skills and knowledge in Hungarian as a foreign language to be able to endorse items formulated in relatively complex wording such as the National Assessment of Basic Competencies.
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