The first few weeks: Getting organised and getting used to studying

Perhaps the first major difference the students experience in their new culture is the need to take much more responsibility for their own studies. This is first of all realised in the

pre-teaching week when students are finding their way round and organising a timetable for themselves by registering for different courses, something which at school was mostly done for them. This can be a very confusing time: “I’m getting used to it. It was very hard at the beginning” (Fiona, Int. 1, p. 2); “The first week was a little bit of chaos. . . . I couldn’t understand the preregistration. But my friend helped me so it was OK” (Brigi, Int. 1, p. 2);

“The administrative part was very confusing especially with my Hungarian major because you don’t have preregistration and so it’s really terrible” (Jane, Int. 1, p. 1); “I have problems with the registration for the courses, like I think everybody. Big problems” (Tibor, Int. 1, p.

2).

While for most students these administration problems were not long lasting, they were clearly a cause of anxiety and when combined with other factors could perhaps exacerbate already existing feelings of unease:

I think, well, I think I’ve settled in now. At the beginning it was very hard to, you know, with all the schedule thing and apply for the courses and no “You are in, you are not in, you are…” – everything just turned out to be wrong and maybe I forgot to buy a book or I don’t know what else. And there were so many expenses. You know, a lot of money to buy the books and all the handouts, and I cannot find the library, I cannot find the printing office, I cannot find the right building what I am looking for.

Yeah, sometimes when I was looking for my French course at the Múzeum Körút and I thought that I am in the building E but it turned out that this is the D. But I think now I’m settled in and I manage to work beside the study so I’m working 2 days a week and this is almost during the weekends. And I think now it’s fine. Almost.

(Csenge, Int. 1, pp. 1-2)

The feeling of disorientation here is quite palpable, and even though Csenge says that the situation is fine, the final “Almost” betrays her lingering doubt. The underlying reason for this doubt lies somewhere else, as will be seen shortly, but her difficulty adapting to the day to day life of university almost certainly serves to increase her unease.

The bigger challenge which students experience in their first weeks is not organising their timetable but organising themselves to be effective students. Some of them realise this early on:

This is just the beginning of the university and at the moment I’m a bit chaotic. I mean I feel, I’m trying to get everything in order and I write lots of little notes what I have to read for the next week. At the moment it’s not really organised. But I hope I’m getting better. (Krisztina, Int. 1, p. 5)

This is not an easy task to manage and Krisztina was still experiencing problems managing her workload at the end of the second semester. She was by no means alone in this respect;

most of the students experienced difficulty coping with their workload at times, particularly towards the end of the semester, and often this caused considerable anxiety. Fiona was experiencing this in Week 11 of her first semester: “Well . . . everything’s starting to get very (pause) I don’t know, there’s too many things I have to do. So that’s not good” (Fiona, Int. 2, p. 1). Julie experienced the same thing:

FP: How are things going at the university right now?

Julie: Yeah. Quite fine, just I think I fall behind a bit with all the things because I just have a huge heap of things to do, and now I’m going, like, “Oh my God! What shall I do now?” (Julie, Int. 2, p. 1)

Part of the reason for the difficulty students experience in managing their own learning is not just that most of them are not used to taking full responsibility for this but that they have to deal with an increase in the difficulty and amount of their study tasks. Many of the students commented on the amount and difficulty of the reading they had to do:

Well I have some problems. For example with literature. For me it’s not – I’m really not achieving and I know I have to read a lot but I don’t think I should start with essays like Plato and philosophical works. I can’t even understand them in Hungarian.

So it’s quite embarrassing. (Krisztina, Int. 1, p. 2) FP: And day to day, things are OK?

Julie: Yeah. Just library stuff and a lot of things we have to read. The original like critical essays. That’s a bit problematic for me.

FP: What, actually getting them or reading them?

Julie: Yeah, reading them on time. (Julie, Int. 1, p. 3) Tibor put it quite succinctly:

Tibor: Yeah. Plenty to read.

FP: That’s what I heard from other students.

Tibor: And very difficult texts. Last time we had to read a T.S. Eliot essay. It could be in Chinese for me. (Tibor, Int. 1, p. 4)

For those students doing a double major, which amounted to 12 out of the20 in the sample, the workload could be even greater. Richard experienced great difficulties in keeping up with both his majors and this was apparent from early on:

Well, I can say that I settled in but for me it’s unusual all these homeworks [sic] and things like that. All the readings we do. And I have another major and I have to do their homeworks and I have to understand those too. So it’s a bit too much. (Richard, Int. 1, 2)

Vilmos and Fiona both mentioned that the sheer number of classes they had enrolled for in their two majors – both of them were doing 34 hours a week – made it hard to cope. Vilmos had trouble preparing: “I have 34 subjects [hours] now and it’s quite hard to find the time to prepare for class” (Vilmos, Int.1, p. 4). And Fiona admitted that she did not always go to all her classes: “I have tons of classes, so, like what, 34 or something, so like 17 times one and a half hours. I don’t go to all of them. But I like both. I like Math and English” (Fiona, Int.1, p. 2). Double majors also presented increased difficulties in finding workable timetables – sometimes students experienced timetable clashes which meant they could not attend one seminar or lecture because they had to be somewhere else at the same time, and this could also mean that a student had to spend quite a lot of time travelling between parts of the university:

It’s quite uncomfortable when somebody has two majors and like, in half an hour I have to get to Astoria and then back. And usually it always turns out that I have like one class here and one class there. And I’m just travelling the whole day. (Vilmos, Int. 1, p. 4)

These organisational difficulties and problems taking charge of their own learning are common to nearly all new students to some extent, a fact acknowledged by some teachers, such as ASC Teacher A:

Cos lots of students at that age of 18, they’re fresh from school, they’ve been, I don’t wish to be negative but they’ve been led along by their teachers previously. They’ve been spoon fed to a certain extent. They don’t have the independence, and they don’t have the independent academic skills. So I think that first semester is very necessary for them to become acquainted with what it means to study on your own, and how to make good use of libraries, of databases, internet resources, and teachers as well. So I think lots of students are a little bit at sea when they first arrive but it’s quite natural I guess. (ASC Teacher A, p. 2)

However, some students will obviously adapt quicker than others. Being able to study effectively is, of course, an essential part of being a student and those students who come from the more academically oriented schools will probably find it easier to make the step up.

Alice was one of the few who seemed to adapt quickly so that even in the first semester she was able to cope with a large workload in terms of writing assignments:

Alice: I have finished three of my seminar papers.

FP: Already?!

Alice: I have four. Yeah. The Linguistics is left.

FP: You’ve got four. That’s for both majors?

Alice: Two for History and two for English.

FP: Uhuh. So that’s good progress. Well done. And you, so feel that you’re coping with the work demands?

Alice: Yeah. (Alice, Int.2, p. 1)

Alice had attended a bilingual secondary school and had written plenty of essays of various types.

The family background of the student is likely to play a not insignificant part as well, as already pointed out by Literature Teacher 3. Alice’s parents were both university graduates in the same subjects she had decided to study. The same was true for Jane, and she also did a lot of essay writing at school. Like Alice, Jane seemed to take to university study easily. She did, however, acknowledge that the step up to university was harder than she had anticipated:

I, well, actually I thought it will be easier because everyone says that after secondary school university’s much better, I have so much free time and so on. I don’t have free time, absolutely not.

So it’s a bit more difficult. But I enjoy it and I think if you learn how to cope with the situation, and also how to register for the seminars, especially at the Hungarian Department but sometimes also here, it goes quite well. (Jane, Int. 6, p. 7)

For students who have had much less help preparing for university and who may be amongst the first in their family to study at university, the transition is likely to be much more difficult. The consequences of not learning how to cope with the new situation can be struggling to meet deadlines and rushing work. Even some of those who came from families with a strong academic background like Fiona had problems with deadlines in the first semester: “Yeah, we have this Linguistics essay and I haven’t even started it and I have to hand it in a week from now. So that’s horrible” (Fiona, Int.2, p. 1). Not surprisingly, students like Richard with little or no academic tradition in their family and who had not received any preparation at school for university study (“The way they prepared me? Well English, not at all. So I couldn’t say that my former school prepared me for this” (Richard, Int. 6, p. 8)) experienced problems managing their studies and this could seriously affect their writing:

“Well the only problem I might have sometimes when I don’t have enough time to do an essay I’m really frustrated and stressed with it to do it properly, because I don’t want to do a worthless job” (Richard, Int. 2, p. 1). Richard had to write two seminar papers in his first semester and in both cases he missed the deadline and had to ask for an extension. The consequences of this were that he sent the essays by email and did not get any written feedback on them.

Richard also ran into difficulties in his first exam period, a part of university culture that virtually all students feared, even the most able ones:

FP: My first question is how are things going in the university?

Jane: Pretty well I would say, but as the exams are approaching I feel that something bad will happen to me. (Laughs) So, well it’s a case of /?/ and, well, I think

exams will be quite hard and it will be difficult to organise when to have which exams. (Jane, Int. 2, p. 1)

Jane passed all her exams, but in Richard’s case something bad did happen when he failed all his English exams because he was not able to manage his study time effectively: “Er, I had problems, I didn’t learn. So that was the main problem. Too little time. I had many exams, I didn’t have even the mood to start learning. But next time!” (Richard, Int.3, p. 1). By his own admission, Richard was not used to the intensive study routine necessary for him to do well at university: “Phew! Well I have to say that I was a bit lazy at school so… (We both laugh) And I have to change that sort of behaviour right here, or right now, but, um, hm!”

(Richard, Int. 6, p. 8). In his case it took a lot longer to overcome the initial culture shock of studying at university.

Beyond the organisational aspects of university study, new students face other difficulties when they enter the classroom and begin learning new subjects in new ways. Here too, the less well-prepared and less proficient students are likely to face more severe problems. They are also much more likely to endure self-questioning of their own competence to be a student.

6.2.2 Enduring a crisis of confidence: Am I good enough? For some students the culture shock experienced when they first enter university goes beyond organisational problems. When they look around them in the classroom, they realise that whereas in their school they were probably amongst the best in their class, now they are far from the best.

This can come as an unpleasant realisation: “But it’s new for me that although I was the best in my class in grammar school, I’m among the worst in the new class, and it’s hard to manage with this thought” (Natalie, Int. 1, p. 2). For a few students this growing awareness of their weakness compared to others leads to a loss of confidence and a growing anxiety that they will not be able to cope. In particular, Steven, Estella, and Csenge all experienced this kind of

deep misgiving. A few weeks into the first semester their doubts were already evident when they were asked how they were getting on:

Well I’m worried about that I won’t be able to get a degree because I – so in Gy______ [his home town] I was pretty good in English but here I’m not so good so all the people were abroad, they lived there for several years, so their parents are English teachers or they’re not even Hungarians, they’re Croatian or not even Hungarians, and they speak English pretty good. And I’m not so good. And I have this fear that I, maybe I won’t be good enough. (Steven, Int. 1, p. 2)

It’s a hard question. Yesterday we – I live in a dormitory – and yesterday we talked about university with the others, and I said that I enjoy the university feeling and everything what happens with me, but I’m not sure that I’m in the right place. So maybe I should find another major or another thing to learn because sometimes I feel that I’m not, that my English isn’t enough to do these lessons and these things. And it’s not good and I should decide if I can do it or I can’t, and if I can’t then I should choose another thing to learn. (Estella, Int. 1, p. 2)

In one hand it’s very unusual for me because my teacher always told me that ‘Oh, of course you were born to learn English and this is the best thing what you can do – to go to university and learn a lot of English and just English. And that’s fine – it will be the perfect choice for you.’ And then I came here and then: ‘Oh my God! What happens here – I cannot understand.’ Or maybe I understand but what I told you – there is a lot of work and a lot of structures and there is a lot of tests when I just get 3 or 2 and I got always 5s, and it was unusual when I got a 4. And here it’s unusual when I manage to get a 3. So. And I’m very happy when I ‘Oh 3! Wonderful!’ Yeah, it’s very strange. And what came into my mind that maybe it wasn’t the perfect choice but I just cannot think of anything else and maybe, I really hope it will turn out that it was a good choice. (Csenge, Int. 1, p. 1)

The first time students whose English skills are significantly weaker than those around them become aware of this difference is probably through speaking in class, particularly when they hear more proficient students speak. Even for relatively strong students like Viki, who had just completed a one-year training course as a tourist guide and taken her final exam in English and two other languages, there was a feeling that others were much better at speaking:

“I expected that I will improve in speech, but actually I became intimidated because now I know how people can speak English and how I cannot” (Viki, Int. 3, p. 1). Interestingly, this difference was also commented on by the stronger students themselves; Vilmos expressed surprise that such weak students could manage with their studies:

Because it really surprises me that there are people here who (pause) well, really cannot speak English, like they use past tense after ‘did’ and they really say ridiculous things and I cannot imagine how they passed their entrance exams, and, like, I cannot even imagine how they manage to do the homeworks [sic] at home because I reckon it must take them longer than other students, or, I have no idea but… (Vilmos, Int. 6, p.

7)

Jane had initially been worried about her own proficiency, but then realised that in reality she was much better than a lot of the students around her:

When I first came to university I was a bit nervous that probably I won’t understand things and I had this feeling that everybody will have better English. Because somehow I had the impression that people who lived in the States come here or, I don’t know. But, well after a while I realised that I’m doing well, and there are many people who have absolutely nothing to do here, I mean they don’t like Literature, Linguistics, they have horrible English. Sometimes I hear people speaking English in such a way that I can’t make out what they are going to say and, well, you know, if they will be teachers at secondary school, well, also they are teacher trainees I think the students simply will laugh at them. And it’s always something horrible I feel that there is no one helping these people to improve a bit. (Jane, Int. 6, p. 7)

Her last comment indicates that those students with serious weaknesses were not able to get the help they need, and she may well have been right; while first-year students have Language Practice classes twice a week, these are probably insufficient to address the serious problems of the weakest students, particularly when it comes to writing, which is not the main focus of these courses.

While speaking was where the gulf between the strong and the weak was most obvious, it was with their studies, particularly when it came to homework, that these weaker students really felt that they were out of their depth. As Csenge mentions in the quote above, suddenly a 3 became a good mark, and for all the students, strong and weak, their marks were very important to them. It is apparent when looking at the questionnaires that the students filled in in the second week (see Appendix A) that they were already aware that they had problems. Csenge, for instance, wrote that she needed help with the “use of the tenses” and

“more accurate work” (Csenge, Student Questionnare) in answer to question 8, which asked if there was anything in particular the student needed help with when writing in English, and

Estella wrote that “Sometimes I can’t use the correct form of words, and I have a lot of grammatically [sic] mistakes” (Estella, Student Questionnaire). However, it was only when they started to get corrections and marks on their work that the full extent of their problems became clear:

Yes. It’s hard for me because I love English very much and I thought that I’m good in it. But when we got the homeworks [sic] and essays I saw that I have a lot of problems, a lot of mistakes /?/ and I think that it’s not good. And if we learn something but we realise that it’s not our cup of tea we have to change. And I’m hesitating. (Estella, Int. 1, p. 2)

For Csenge, the feedback on her writing was very different from what she had been used to at school. Figure 13 shows the beginning of the only essay that Csenge wrote while at university:

The advantages of introducing the voluntary army

If we are taking a glance at the everydays of a country’s population, we can see that one of the most important things in their life is the security. Copanies are spending an extremely large sum of money on hiring guards to ensure people that they are in safe. And we can face a similar situation in the case of a war as well. People want the government to protect them.

That is why, for a cost- and combat-effective fighting force, the government should keep the institution of the voluntary army.

(Argumentative essay, Csenge)

Figure 13. Opening of argumentative essay written for the ASC.

Csenge received a fail grade for this essay and was asked to rewrite it. All of the copious feedback on her essay was negative, finishing with this comment: “You have an enormous number of spelling mistakes. Don’t you have spellcheck installed on your computer?”

(Csenge, teacher comment on ASC argumentative essay). It is perhaps not surprising that

Csenge chose to leave the university after only one semester and to apply to do a vocational course at another institution, something that she could see as being of practical use to her.

For Csenge, probably the biggest problem was not her problems with accuracy in her writing but that she could not see the point of the subjects she was studying. Several of the students experienced problems understanding and relating to their studies. Krisztina and Natalie both found the Introduction to Linguistics course very difficult and both felt a particular aversion to the seminar paper that they had to do for it. Natalie said “It’s quite terrific and terrible, and also – it’s great and fearful also. So I don’t know what to do with it”

(Natalie, Int.2, 6) and Krisztina had similar feelings, saying that “it’s very frightening because if I miss something then I just fail” (Krisztina, Int.2, p. 7). Although there were exceptions – for instance, Emily felt that “For me linguistics is more interesting than literature” (Emily, Int.1, p. 3) – it seemed that more students found studying Linguistics to be a bigger challenge than studying Literature. However, Csenge found that she could not relate to either of her main subjects:

And, for example Academic Skills is, I like that one and the Language Practice, but the Literature and the Linguistics and so on are just far away from me and from my personality. And I just, I know that I will – I have to study them later, and there are people who love the Literature and the others who love the Linguistics but I’m just not interested in neither of them. (Emily, Int.2, 1)

Ultimately it was during a Linguistics lecture, though, that she reported finally making her mind up to leave. This seemed to be a moment of sudden realisation, a kind of personal epiphany:

When it first came into my mind, honestly, it was during a Linguistic, umm, not the seminar but how – ? . . . Lec-, yes, lecture. When the Professor said something so boring and so I don’t know what, just for me – maybe it’s very interesting for others – and I was just sitting there and I think about ‘When will it finish?’. And after one and a half hour he said that ‘Oh yes, this is what Lingui-, what Syntax is about!’ And I just collapsed. (Laughs) And I suddenly realised in that very moment that ‘I don’t want to do it’. And, I don’t know, I just – I think I would like to change.” (Csenge, Int. 2, p. 1)

In document DOKTORI (PhD) DISSZERTÁCIÓ (Pldal 118-134)