Week 3, Part 1: Analysing Preliminary Survey Results

This week I was able to get a lot done! For the survey, I was able to contact an administrator from the school who directed me to a staff member who was in charge of communications as well as the school newsletter. Unfortunately, a few days after e-mailing him, I found out that he doesn't work for the school anymore and the Head of School told me that I can just send it to him instead and he can get it into the newsletter. Although it hasn't been in the school newsletter yet (I'll have to wait till next week), I was able to send it out to a group of parents through the BASIS Parents Google Group and receive 32 responses within two or three days!

Here are some results from the current set of responses:

To clarify, the portions for Hindi and Mandarin Chinese also include those who speak Hindi and other Indian languages or Chinese and other Chinese languages. Here are the specifics for those surveyees:

• Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, and Sanskrit

• Hindi and Punjabi

• Hindi and Telugu

• Hindi and Marathi

• Mandarin and Shanghainese

• Mandarin and Taiwanese

Responses for "Other":

• Essay writing

• Understanding spelling and phone numbers as someone is speaking

• Culture

• Understanding jokes and analogies

• Understanding idioms

• Pronouns

Here are some things I found interesting:

• The overwhelming number of Chinese people who took the survey, especially since I thought there were more active Indian BASIS parents in the group and more Indian families at our school. It's a stretch, but I keep thinking it's because I'm Chinese and maybe the Chinese parents felt more compelled to help me because of our common ethnicity.

• The number of people who began learning English since before age 12 and have actually been learning English pretty much their whole lives

• Only one Indian language speaker began learning English after age 12

• The number of people who took the liberty to type an answer for the question about difficulties while learning English and said something about the difficulty they experienced understanding English idioms, jokes, and culture.

• No one thought apostrophes were a problem even though is it almost solely an English thing to use contractions. Apostrophes are used in a few other languages, but not for contractions.

• Someone responded to a question in Chinese... Maybe he/she assumed I could read Chinese or it was just easier to respond in Chinese.

Although I wasn't able to get my survey in the newsletter this week like I'd hoped, I'm glad that I was able to first send it to a smaller group of people. This preliminary surveying helped me to see some faults in my survey, especially on detail. Originally, I didn't want to make it as detailed as I could have because I thought a longer survey would turn people off from taking it and I would not get enough submissions. However, I've realized through the first 32 submissions that my survey definitely has some flaws. For example, I only asked about when the person moved to an English-speaking country, but not about how long she or he has lived in one, which makes a huge difference in ESL acquisition. I will take time to revise my survey to fill in the missing holes and send it in for it to be published in the newsletter afterward.