Pedagogiczne nauki

Anar Mustafayeva

The questionnaire among the International students

Abstract. This paper presents the main widespread linguistic difficulties of students who come from different countries to the UK, particularly to study at Reading university. Ten students participated in the questionnaire and shared their previous experience of learning English and problems faced. The questionnaires were distributed to only International students. Now there are a lot of students from developing countries who wish to develop their English and get a prime example of effective learning based on personal practical experience. The answers to general questions; there were representatives of each country shown above. According to the figures, the median year for English learning is 17 years and for living (studying) in the UK –1 year 7 months and an average age period participants is 21-25 years old.

Key words. English, language, learning, skills, difficulty.

Methodology. A trial version of the questionnaire consisted of two parts; the general and specific information dealing with English language difficulties. It was printed and distributed to six students of group A who come from Kazakhstan learning English at ISLC (International Study Language Center) in order to pre-test the questionnaire and reach easy understanding at first sight. The average time required for these students was 15 minutes. Some comments were received related to deleting the questions such as “Name of the student” and “IELTS score”, where the former was considered not important and had no influence on the results of the research and the latter as private information. In addition to this, the questionnaire was shortened from 10 to 8 questions, as the last two questions might take between 5-8 minutes to give a complete answer and that can put off students from filling out the questionnaire during the exam period.

After rating all instructions, the final version of the questionnaire was done and contained 8 questions: 2 dealing with the listening skills, another 2 with reading skills and 4 dealing with main skills of the language – listening, writing, speaking and reading. The questionnaire was printed as two sheets of paper and distributed among 10 international students. Additionally, one interview was recorded on 10^th of May and transcribed.

Results. In the filling out of the questionnaire students from different countries of Africa, Asia and Europe continents - Palestine, Brunei, Norway, Malaysia, Japan, China, Singapore, Spain and Lebanon took part. Among the 10 students (6 female and 4 male) participated in the questionnaire 2 come from China. As regards the other international students, they were representatives of each country shown above. According to the figures, the median year for English learning is 17 years and for living (studying) in the UK –1 year 7 months and an average age period participants is 21-25 years old.

It is interesting to note that for 50 per cent of the students the most difficult skill is writing, less difficult listening (25%) and least difficult speaking (10%).

Another interesting opinion is the students faced some problems resulting from misunderstanding English native speech when they first arrived in the UK. The majority of them (60%) agreed that the main problem is jargon and slang. While 30% support the view that the most difficult problem was the fast speech of the British.

Within the most difficult grammar questions the first position was taken by tenses and articles, 40% each of them and the least plural nouns. It is clear that radio programmes were the most difficult and the least movies. In comparison to TV programmes, songs and news were less difficult.

As can be seen a large percentage of the students (60%) support reading books to develop English reading skills, while a small proportion of them (20%) consider books for children the least useful. Another type of improving reading skills is the reading of newspapers only one of them answered they always read newspapers and only one never reads them.

Another interesting opinion is about percentage that the students can understand when watching movies in English without subtitles is 80-92%. It is hardly surprising therefore, to find in question 5, that 50 per cent of all students asked are able to understand 90-100%.

Conclusion. To sum up, the students besides some difficulties in English learning, demonstrated a high level of understanding of native speech, using jargon and slang, continued to improve their English knowledge by reading, watching and speaking.

References

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2. Bayley, S., Fearnside, R., Arnol, J., Misiano, J. and Rottura, R. (2002) International students in Victoria. People and Place, 10, (2), 45-54.

3. Wong, J. K. (2004) Are the learning styles of Asian internationals culturally or contextually based? International Education Journal, 4, (4), 154-166.