The Impact on Teachers of Language Variation as a Course Component
RESULTS
Views of Sociolinguistics Compared with Other Topics
Section B in “Questionnaire Design” comprised four sub-sections designed to reveal how accurately respondents remembered the composition of their twelve-course program, and to compare how they rated each of the courses they claimed to have followed in terms of personal importance, professional gain and general importance. There is not space to report our results in detail here, but the key findings were:
1. The very small number of mis-responses (fewer than 3%) to the first question (‘Which of the following courses constituted part of your MA program ...?’) reinforced our confidence in the genuineness and accuracy of other responses.
2. In response to the question, ‘How important was it to you, as a language teaching professional, that these courses were part of your MA program?’ sociolinguistics fares reasonably well compared with the other eleven available coursesiii. 57.4% of the 54 respondents who completed this item rated sociolinguistics as having been ‘essential’, compared with the mean ‘essential’ score for all available courses of 69.3% (SD = 20.2, z = 0.59).
3. ‘How much did you gain from each course in terms of your professional development?’ also elicits an enthusiastic response, with 70.0% of respondents feeling they had gained ‘a lot’ or ‘quite a lot’ from sociolinguistics, compared with a mean for all available courses of 72.7% (SD = 14.3).
4. In terms of how important respondents felt each course to be in more general terms, i.e. whether they would include them if planning a similar program, we found that subjects would be less likely to include topics they had not themselves studied. Sociolinguistics once again gets a respectable rating with 40.4% including it in their ‘compulsory course’ list, and a further 45.6% rating it as ‘important but should not be compulsory’ compared with the all available course means of 65.2% (SD = 21.1) and 24.6% (SD = 13.8) respectively.
A number of respondents admitted to knowing little about Sociolinguistics until they took the course, which helps to explain why some currently unavailable courses, such as semiotics, were rejected as potential curriculum items: ‘I even had to go away and check what semiotics is’, confesses one confused respondent, while another writes, ‘I am not actually sure what genre analysis is’.
The general conclusion we must draw thus far is that students found their courses to be, on the whole, appropriate, and are reluctant to trade satisfactory courses for those which they know little about. However, one frequent comment concerns the possibility of selecting options, or elective courses:
I didn’t have any choice in what courses I took. I would have liked to take some of the others offered through the on campus program. ie. Psycholinguistics, Corpus Linguistics. etc
Many of these courses were not offered as part of the distance program in Korea. I selected the “no opinion” option for all of these but would have certainly liked the opportunity to have taken a few of them in my course of study.
Since undertaking this study we have introduced options to the program.
iii ‘Available courses’ refers to the twelve courses actually offered to participants. The scores for other, unavailable courses have been excluded from the calculations for items B2, B3 and B4, so that responses for courses actually experienced by respondents can be compared directly.
