In the following section, the interview summaries from two of the teachers for the NOMSA program will be provided. While they were asked about different focuses in the class sessions, the main focus was to investigate how they dealt with the issues of ELF and motivation in their classes. Similar to the students, there were differences in the amounts of explanation each of the teachers provided.
4.3.1. Teacher A
The first teacher interviewee was a female aged 54. She was a native speaker of Norwegian and held an old ‘Hovedfag’ degree (an old version of Masters Degree which lasted for 7 years she explained) in ‘Germanistic’. She had been teaching the German linguistics and also the German Business and Tourism Language to the Norwegian students for 22 years at UiS. Then after such a long period, those programs were no more offered at the University of Stavanger. Thus, she decided to switch to teaching the Norwegian language and attended ‘Norwegian as a Second Language’ course for 1 year in 2011 and at the time of the interview, it was 3 years that she was teaching in the NOMSA program. She taught the ‘På Vei’ book in the classroom and also devised tasks for the students’ self-study hours. She had 6 hours of teaching with group 2, plus 3 hours of self-study for which she was not present. What she provided for the students was a mixture of vocabulary, grammar, written and oral exercises, both for her class hours and the students’ self-study hours. She admitted that she emphasized communication and activity among students.
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Teacher A explained that at the beginning of the program, English was used for the teaching. Gradually she would start to use the Norwegian language as well; she explained and wrote on the board both in English and Norwegian. From the start, she always reminded the students that they were going to use solely the Norwegian language from the October 1st. However, she added that it might not be possible to set an exact and strict deadline for stopping the usage of English and she mainly used the date to push the students to switch to Norwegian as soon as possible. The teacher admitted that “since the students come from different nationalities and study backgrounds, they are interested in knowing each other, and thus use English mostly”.
As an encouragement, she always reminded the students that nobody expected them to speak perfect Norwegian, and asked them to make efforts to use the Norwegian language. Then she pointed to the student life and that the students needed to work to earn some money. At work the students mostly used English, first because they still did not know enough Norwegian, and secondly because the use of English was common in the Norwegian society. At this point of the interview she pointed to the English language as a problem. Considering the fact that workplace for the student jobs in Stavanger mostly meant supermarkets, restaurants, bars, and hotels, it could be an opportunity to interact with NSs or even practice with NNSs.
She pointed to the features of motivated students in her classroom and said “they work a lot, study hard, submit the tasks on time, and ask for a second correction on a piece of writing”.
Teacher A stated that she always encouraged the students to join student clubs and sports club to meet the Norwegian students and communicate with them. When I asked Teacher A about her reaction in case a student asked something in English, she answered “I will stop him and ask him to try to say it in Norwegian; my answer is in Norwegian anyway”. When trying to talk to the teacher, the students were allowed to get help from the student sitting next to them. She pointed that “the amount of help a student might get from English, depends upon himself, but if it continues for a long time, it will be counter-productive”. She mentioned herself as always emphasizing one principle in the classroom, which was “if you work hard, I will work hard; that is if you show motivation, I will work more”. The students themselves must be motivated to use opportunities to learn Norwegian, rather than abusing their chances with using English, she believed. She added that Stavanger dialect, as different from the Bokmål dialect which is used in the classroom, would be introduced to the student from January.
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Teacher B was a 51-year-old male, also a native speaker of Norwegian. He was responsible for helping the students in the computer room. He explained that his background studies were Master of Arts in Foreign Language Teaching and added that he has been teaching in the NOMSA program for 3 years, at the interview time. He emphasized that their main focus at the computer room to be on the grammatical points of the Norwegian language. He also admitted that the language used in the first 3 or 4 weeks of the program was English, but from October they would switch to Norwegian. Asking him about his language choice when students asked questions in English, he replied “I would always answer in Norwegian, because I believe they understand more than they can speak”.
Teacher B emphasized one characteristic of unmotivated students in his classroom and that was their use of languages other than Norwegian. He believed students who choose to communicate to each other in their L1 (if they have a common one) or English (as a common language among NOMSA student) were the unmotivated language learners. Stating the same procedures for the placement of students in different groups, as teacher A did, he pointed to the fact that if the students failed the final exam, they had the opportunity to take the exam two more times. He continued by saying that after three unsuccessful attempts, the students can go for the Bergen test. However, the fact was that without passing either the final NOMSA exam or Bergen test, they would not have the opportunity to continue their studies in programs which were taught in Norwegian.
4.4. Summary
In order to conduct the current research, there was a need to access NOMSA students’ and teachers’ individual experiences regarding the learning of Norwegian. Thus, applying qualitative interviews and with the use of interview guides, the researcher tried to shed light on the following issues: students’ motivation in learning the Norwegian language, their use of English as the lingua franca, and their language choice for the out-of-class exposures. The needed and relevant information was obtained and Chapter four was the presentation of the data collected during the interviews, in the form of summaries. The summaries were provided in two different sections for
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students and teachers. In the next chapter, the results presented in this chapter will be analyzed based on the previous researches and the Socio-educational model.
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Chapter Five:
Discussion
5.1. Introduction
Motivation and ELF have been recognized as being among the significant and influential elements in learning a foreign language in an SA program. Particularly, in contexts such as NOMSA, where there is a great deal of cultural and linguistic diversity among the students, the role of motivational features and English as the common language became more highlighted. The present research aimed to shed light on different motivations among NOMSA students, their use of English as the language of communication, and their choice of language for out of class interactions as an indicator of their motivation. To this aim, the students’ individual experiences regarding their language use and motivational features were focused on. The teachers of the specific target group of the current study were also interviewed about the students’ learning behaviors and language use in the classroom.
The data were collected through the application of qualitative interviews and presented in the previous chapter in the form of summaries. Though each student had his/her unique
experiences in the past, specific concerns at the present time, and particular future plans, some common patterns might be observed. In this chapter, the experiences and ideas of students and teachers, which were presented in chapter four, will be analyzed. The discussions will be based on the recurring themes and compared to the previous research in the fields under investigation in the current research: the roles of motivation and ELF in the learning of Norwegian among
NOMSA students.