3 Research design
3.4 The participants of the learner interview study
Fourteen experienced adult or young adult language learners were selected for the learner interviews by purposive sampling. This age group was selected because, compared to younger learners, young adults or adults already have the ability to articulate their opinion on the competences that their teachers need and the ways in which they are supposed to develop.
As can be seen from the interview transcripts, this assumption proved true and even within the selected sample older learners displayed a more acute awareness and an ability to more precisely articulate their views than younger learners.
In terms of their experience, the criteria for selection included the following:
Participants had learnt English and other languages for several years and/or had many language teachers. In addition to learners who had a long language learning history, learners who were once students in a special English class at secondary grammar school were also considered to be useful sources of information because these students usually had had the
same or several teachers for many years and many contact hours (6-12 45-minute sessions) per week. Thus, learner participants were seen as “insiders with insider information” (Patton, 2002, p. 368), which means that they were “ideal” informants. Patton regards researchers as outsiders to the situation or context studies (ibid.). Being a teacher of English myself, I, however, was not entirely “an outsider”.
The two youngest learner participants were 17 years old, the oldest was in her 50s and most of the remaining participants were in the age group between 20 and 29 with three participants between 30 and 39. By accident, no participants were between 40 and 49. (See details of the participants’ background in Table 4). A series of pilot interviews was carried out by interviewing former students of mine. Data collection was mostly completed with participants I had never taught but three out of the fourteen participants had previously been my students. For easy identification, the participants were given English pseudonyms even though all but one were native speakers of Hungarian. One of the learner participants was a bilingual speaker of Hungarian and Bulgarian.
Table 4 Major learner participant characteristics Participants Age Foreign
languages spoken
Language learning experience
(years)
Number of English language
teachers
Present occupation
Ann 20-29 English
German
17 20 Café manager
Beth 20-29 English
Swedish German
12 10-12 Customer relations officer in an international car-rental company Brian 14-19 English,
French
8 8 Secondary school learner
Britney 20-29 English French Italian Latin
20 14 University student, trainee
Dorothy 14-19 English Italian Spanish
12 7 Secondary school learner
Erin 20-29 English
French Spanish
16 10-12 University student
German Evelyn 20-29 English
German
10 9 University student, trainee
Gwen 50-59 English
German Russian
40 10 Telecommunications
engineer Irene 20-29 English
Italian
15 16-18 College student
Maureen 30-39 English German (Russian)
15-20 10 Human resources manager
in a bank Muriel 30-39 English
German Russian
12 7 Custody manager in a bank
Sylvia 14-19 English German Bulgarian
14 6 Secondary school learner
Steven 30-39 English Italian (Russian)
9 5 Fashion store manager
Tina 20-29 English
German Spanish
15 20 Marketing assistant
As regards the languages that the participants speak, all of them are speakers and learners of English and at least one other foreign language, but most of them have learnt and speak several other foreign languages. The second most frequently spoken foreign language among participants is German, which is also true for Hungarian foreign language learners in general. One telling piece of data for illustration is that more than one million language exams were taken between 2003 and 2012 in English while 500,000 were taken in German (http://www.nyak.hu/doc/statisztika.asp?strId=_43_). The third most frequently learnt language in the sample is Italian followed by Spanish, French and Russian with an equal share. Russian is mostly spoken by the older generation or, as the participants themselves put it, it is a language they did at school but can not speak either because they never could or because they had forgotten (indicated by brackets in Table 4). All in all, the participants have a language learning history of minimum eight years but the average is over fifteen years.
Participants had been taught by a minimum of five teachers but the average number of teachers participants had in their lives is eleven.
At the time of the interview, three of the fourteen learner participants were still at school and four of them were students in tertiary level education while the remaining seven participants worked. Two of the students had part-time jobs as well: after they had finished their BA studies and were involved in studying at Master’s level, they also worked at schools as beginner teachers or trainees. Roughly, a third of the participants, Beth, Brian, Britney, Gwen and Evelyn, were born outside Budapest, while the rest come from the capital. Out of the five participants who are from the countryside, all either worked or studied in the capital, except Brian, who lived and studied in a provincial town.
Ann is a recent business school graduate working as a café manager at the moment.
Having graduated from an American school in Vienna, she is a fluent speaker of English and German and has a high number of foreign friends. She is an enthusiastic language learner and is proud of her mother who has recently started learning English on her own.
Beth is a fresh English and Swedish BA graduate of one of the highest-ranking universities of Budapest. She decided to start work at the age of 22 and uses mostly Swedish at her workplace, a car-rental company. As it is an international company, her job includes understanding customer complaints from Scandinavian countries in Norwegian, Danish and Swedish and replying to them in Swedish. Her goal for the next few years is to improve her Swedish, a language she says she was fortunate to take up, although she does sometimes help her younger brother with his English. Beth can be considered to be a disappointed learner as regards English since she commented on her studies at the prestigious university quite negatively. She was not satisfied with the quality of the education she had received and “after ten years of learning English, I cannot put four sentences together without accuracy problems”. Beth thinks she is not patient enough to become a language teacher, that is the
reason why she terminated her studies after obtaining her bachelor’s degree, and she considers herself lucky with Swedish: learning it was a “sensible thing to do”.
Brian had just finished secondary grammar school when he was interviewed. He is a fluent speaker of English and French, both of which he had learnt through hard work and mostly traditional methods in state schools, language schools and in one-to-one situations. His mother with three children supplements her income by giving private lessons to schoolchildren despite being a qualified agricultural engineer, so Brian also had direct English language assistance in his home in addition to his lessons. After the interview, Brian left for France to pursue higher education studies in French.
Britney thinks she is different from ordinary English language learners because before studying it in a formal setting, she had acquired the English language while and as a result of playing with an American neighbour’s children at a very young age, around the age of 6. At the time of the interview she was pursuing MA studies in teaching English and Hungarian as a foreign language and working in a primary school at the same time. Previously, she had seen good and bad examples of teaching: she said that her French teacher was a disaster while her English teacher set an example for her. First, Britney was taught by this excellent English teacher in primary school. When she got admitted to a secondary school, her teacher, too, happened to change from teaching in primary school to teaching in the same secondary school. Consequently, Britney had the same teacher of English for 10 years. Moreover, the same teacher was her mentor teacher when she became a trainee. In addition to being a beginner teacher, Britney is far from being uninitiated into the teaching profession in two more ways: she has relatives who are teachers and she has been giving remedial classes in English to younger learners since the age of 15.
Dorothy was going to start her final year at secondary school when I met her for the interview. She went to a vocational school specialised in tourism where she had previously
attended a special, intensive one-year course of Italian language. She was an advanced user of English at the time of the interview, having attended many one-to-one classes and being the daughter of an English teacher. She was also an enthusiastic learner of Spanish and Italian, both of which she studied on a one-on-one basis. Earlier, she had also experienced immersion in the target language culture in Spain, where she attended a four-week summer course in Spain.
I have known Erin for almost five years. She was an outstanding student in a one-year intensive English language programme where I was her tutor. She is an intrinsically motivated student who is not only talented but hard-working as well. She believes in “the golden mean”, as she said in the interview, implying that language learning is at its best when learners are enjoying themselves in the classroom but at the same time the rules of the game, requirements and expectations are well-defined for everyone. An advanced speaker of French, Erin is doing a business studies programme where the language of instruction is English. She is in her final year but she also works as a bartender at weekends.
Apart from Britney, Evelyn was the other participant who was not merely a learner but a beginner teacher as well. She had completed her BA studies in the previous year and was at the time of the interview pursuing MA studies alongside teaching English in a primary school 60 kilometres from Budapest. She was recommended to me as a hard-working and enthusiastic student. It turned out that her mother was a teacher of German and had in fact taught Evelyn German for one year when she was a fourth-grader. She became an important source of information since she had witnessed her own mother develop as a teacher.
Gwen is a telecommunications engineer working for the largest telecommunications company in Hungary. Being the oldest and having graduated from a German university, she is the most experienced language learner among the participants. She also happens to be the most proficient speaker of English, evidenced by the fact that she has completed a
post-graduate translating and interpreting programme in English. Even though she did not attend any formal language course at the time of the interview, she would often read novels in English on the train to work, browse English language online news on the Internet or help her daughter with her elementary English homework. All written communication in her company is conducted in English but she admitted that she did not frequently engage in high-level conversations in English (or in Hungarian either) and her knowledge is rather functional.
Gwen has passed C1 language examinations in both German and English.
Irene was a business school student near graduation when she was interviewed. She had attended a special English class at secondary school and as a result is a near-native speaker of English. Before she was interviewed she had spent a term in Italy as an Erasmus exchange student. Irene was known to be an enthusiastic language learner by her peers.
Maureen works as a human resources manager in a bank that operates in Central and Eastern Europe. She has learnt English, German and Russian in various circumstances: state schools, language schools, and one-to-one situations. As regards the learning of English, which she claims is the most important language for her, she is an autonomous learner who does a considerable amount of self-study.
Muriel is a custody manager in a bank with two degrees, one in horticulture and one in economics. Apart from the fact that she used to go to a special Russian class, Muriel is considered to be an experienced learner of English and German as well, having studied all three languages for 8 to 12 years. She believes that languages are best taught through cultural studies.
Sylvia is a bilingual speaker of Hungarian and Bulgarian with Bulgarian parents living in Hungary. She was a secondary school learner at the time of the interview. She is attending a special six-year-long secondary school programme where she studies both English and German. Her mother is an English teacher, a fact to which she frequently referred in the
interview. She started learning Hungarian at kindergarten and would now easily pass for a native Hungarian. Her English is advanced, her sister is studying in Scotland now, so she, too, is considering studying biology in Edinburgh after the school-leaving examination.
Steven is a clothes shop manager who frequently used both Italian and English in his job at the time of the interview. As regards the foreign languages he speaks, he says he has learnt a lot of what he knows on the job even though he has learnt both languages in various schools, from primary to tertiary education and also from private teachers. He does not consider himself a successful language learner and has a low opinion of the Hungarian education system in general.
Tina works as a marketing assistant and studied for an MSc degree at a business school at the time of the interview. She spent some time studying in Seattle and is known for her desire to perfect her English among her English speaking friends. She has been taught by more than twenty teachers, many of whom were native speakers of English. She believes her love of English and motivation to learn it stem from having been taught by one outstanding teacher out of the many she has had.
The learner interviews were conducted in two rounds. The first round provided some input for the compilation of the statements for the teacher questionnaire while the second round of the interviews was conducted after the collection of questionnaire data. The aim of the second round of the interviews was to collect data with a fine-tuned research tool and achieve saturation. The interview protocol was essentially the same in the two rounds, yet one modification was made. Experience with the first version of the validated interview guide had shown that the elicitation of the diagram at the end of the interview should be done in a slightly different way. Therefore, in the second round of the interviews the question concerning the graphic representation of the development of teachers was extended to refer
not only to the way teachers usually develop during their careers but also to the way they should ideally develop.
In retrospect, the majority of the learner interviews provided abundant data for analysis. There were three interviews, however, which were somewhat poorer in insights; the three youngest female respondents, Erin, Dorothy and Sylvia, turned out to be immature to provide as much data as the others. Occasionally, they did not answer my questions and kept talking about irrelevant topics. Nevertheless, I decided to include all the interviews in the analysis, since younger participants’ perspectives were considered to be equally important.