All posts by john

How many people are studying for a languages degree in higher education? Why it is hard to know.

HESA, languages, learning, statistics, ,

How many people are studying for a degree languages in higher education? Does it really matter? Of course it matters a great deal to people who work in language departments. It also matters a great deal if we are to increase the number of students choosing to study languages at university.

Usually, when we talk about numbers studying each language we are presented with a table like the below. This tells us how many students are studying each language/ area study. These are the HESA stats for 2009/10:

Table 1

(R1) French studies Total                                                           14643

(R2) German studies Total                                                         5247

(R3) Italian studies Total                                                             2386

(R4) Spanish studies Total                                                         9961

(R5) Portuguese studies Total                                                    592

(R6) Scandinavian studies Total                                                98

(R7) Russian & East European studies Total                             1829

(R8) European Studies Total                                                      1538

(R9) Others in European languages, lit & related subjects        7816

(T1) Chinese studies Total                                                         1374

(T2) Japanese studies Total                                                       1253

(T3) South Asian studies Total                                                   223

(T4) Other Asian studies Total                                                   407

(T5) African studies Total                                                           235

(T6) Modern Middle Eastern studies Total                                 1224

(T7) American studies Total                                                       3763

(T8) Australasian studies Total                                                 21

(T9) Others in Eastern, Asiatic, African, American & Australasian lang, lit & related subs Total  259

TOTAL                                                                                        52,869

 

Table 1 tells us the number of the individual language learning experiences. However, this does not tell us how much of the language each student is studying.

  1. Table 1 does not tell us how many of the students are studying single honours French (100%) and how many are doing the language for 75%, 50%, 33% or 10% of their time. All other things being equal (though they rarely are) and assuming a direct relationship between student numbers and departmental income a student who studies a language 100% of the time will bring in three times as much funding a student who studies a language for 33.33% and ten times as much as a student who is studying a language for 10%.
  2. Moreover it does not tell us how many students are studying languages as those studying two languages will be counted twice and those studying three languages three times.

Table 2

(R1) French studies Total                                         7410.44

(R2) German studies Total                                       2092.43

(R3) Italian studies Total                                           1296.93

(R4) Spanish studies Total                                        2593.59

(R5) Portuguese studies Total                                  280.67

(R6) Scandinavian studies Total                               73.16

(R7) Russian & East European studies Total           981.18

(R8) European Studies Total                                    1390.17

(R9) Others in European languages, literature & rel 6288.31

(T1) Chinese studies Total                                        901.42

(T2) Japanese studies Total                                     914.03

(T3) South Asian studies Total                                  163.43

(T4) Other Asian studies Total                                  221.94

(T5) African studies Total                                         154.5

(T6) Modern Middle Eastern studies Total               834.75

(T7) American studies Total                                     2551.84

(T8) Australasian studies Total                                7

(T9) Others in Eastern, Asiatic, African, American & Australasian languages, literature & related subjects Total                                                                                  194.67

TOTAL (all languages)                                                28350.46

 

Table 2 can deal with the how much point (I’ll provide more detail at a later date). It shows us the number of Full Person Equivalent (FPE) students. HESA collects data on the percentage of their time spent studying the language. This might be as little as 10% or as much as 100%. Therefore the Full Person Equivalent of people studying languages is 28,230. That is the figure I came to whilst adding all the wholes, halves, this, quarters and tenths.

Returning to point 2 above, some students are studying two or three languages. Therefore the total number of ‘language learning experiences’ exceeds the number of actual students studying languages. If we take away the number of students studying two or more languages our number of individual students studying languages in some way drops from 52,869 individual learning experiences to 42,444 individuals.

So there are 42,444 studying languages in higher education?

No, there are several reasons why this figure is likely to be a severe underestimate.

  1. Data from London Metropolitan University, Liverpool Hope University, and University College Birmingham are excluded. That would add a few more.
  2. Reporting data to HESA is the responsibility of individual institutions. They may report up to three subjects, but that is not to say that they do. Some institutions will report a student studying a language for 10% of their time, but others may not. These figures will include some of the 60,000 ‘non-specialist’ students reported to be undertaking some sort of language study, but not all of them (CILT, the National Centre for Languages (2009) HE students of other disciplines studying   Available from:  http://bit.ly/bw1AT3.
  3. We do know that the category (R9) “Others in European languages, literature & related subjects” is overused as institutions report all their language students in this category. In Table 1 this means that a student who is studying French and German will be reported as having two language learning experiences if they are reported for French AND German, but just one language learning experience if  they are reported under ‘Others’ (R9).
  4. Similarly some languages do not have their own category. Is a student reported as studying ‘Middle East Studies’ studying Arabic, Persian, both or neither?
  5. These figures are for students of first degrees and will not include Continuing Education students or other students on non-accredited courses run by universities. I will take a look at these figures at a later date.

This has been a longer post that I intended. Whatever we make of the figures of, it is useful to think about what we want the data for.  Whatever our interests and motives we will never truly be able to answer the question “How many students are studying languages in higher education?” with any degree of certainty.

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Ten commandments of language teaching

languages, teaching, ,

Browsing through a 75-year-old edition of the Modern Language Journal, I came across this article entitled “Ten Commandments and One More in Modern Foreign Language Teaching” by Harry Kurtz of the University of Nebraska.

His ten tips are:

1. Thou shalt make every student recite every day.

2. Thou shalt make thy questions shorter and distribute them more frequently to the unworthy of thy flock.

3. Thou shalt demand written home-work for every lesson as an evidence of individual effort.

4. Thou mayest spare thy strength in the marking of these by having them corrected in class, but thou shalt collect them and check them off on the rolls.

5. Thou shalt refrain from personal eloquence in the classroom.

6. Remember that the strained silence of pupils thinking is worth more than volubility, thine or theirs.

7. Thou shalt plan thy hour and mark thy pages beforehand, so that never, no never, shalt thou ask thy sheep on what page they stopped grazing the last time.

8. Thou shalt have thy watch before thee to guide thee in the passing of time and to guard thee from over-stressing one thing at the cost of another. So shalt thou finish the assignment and never have the ignominy of covering less than what was imposed upon the fold.

9. Thou shalt watch thy pupils' thoughts as reflected in their faces and hurl the thunder of a question where it may be necessary to recall the straying.

10. And last, so shalt thou prosper and discover the best devices in language teaching in the measure that thou wilt insist upon work and get it.

Harry Kurz, “Ten Commandments and One More in Modern Foreign Language Teaching,” The Modern Language Journal 20, no. 5 (February 1, 1936): 288-293. Full article available from JSTOR.

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Planned obsolescence and cycling

cycling, planned obsolescence, Sustainable development,

I promised further reflections on Alex Steffan’s lecture I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. I have been recently thinking a lot about planned obsolescence, that is designing a product to cease to be functional after a certain amount of time or after a certain amount of use.  The centennial light at the Livermore Firehouse in California is often cited as an example. Over 100 years after its first use the light bulb is still working. It is most often associated with technology – manufacturers not providing backward compatibility when a new version of software is released, printers which cease to work after a certain numbers of pages and products with built in rechargeable batteries which don’t charge any longer.

Regular readers of my blog (does my blog have regular readers?) will know that I enjoy cycling for work and for pleasure. Over the summer I converted my old bike from an 18 gear touring bike to a fixed gear. There were a few reasons for this – firstly after reading Sheldon Brown it struck me that fixed gear riding might be quite fun, and secondly, not that I’m known for being a fashion victim, it seems to be quite trendy at the moment (I even removed the mudguards). However, the real reason was that I needed a new back wheel for my bike and they seem impossible to get (In short I needed a 126mm axle with a freewheel block, rather than a 130mm or 136 mm with a cassette. There are work arounds, but they are expensive – it involves changing the axle spacing, buying a cassette, new chain, new shifters, front and back derailleurs. I suppose I could have got a custom made wheel, but the fixed wheel approach seemed to be the cheaper option.

Some might have limited sympathy with me complaining how I can’t get parts for a twenty-year old bike, but a the writer of a recent letter to Cycle magazine complains that he is unable to get replacement parts which were standard just one year ago. I hear that 8-speed is the next thing that will be impossible to replace.

The irony here is that cycling is such an environmentally friendly hobby (though I’ll reserve judgement on thinking about the environmental impact of events such as the Tour de France). The manufacturers of low quality Bike-Shaped Objects (BSOs) have much to answer for the UK’s volume of unused and scrapped bikes, but manufacturers of good quality bikes are not without blame either.

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Discard the irrelevant: Statistics don’t bleed, but our students do.

LLAS, National Student Survey, quality, quantitative methods, statistics, , ,

I have written an new article for the LLAS blog (in a personal capacity).

 

Some rise by sin and others by virtue fall. William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

Statistics are everywhere in education. We have the National Student Survey (NSS), the First Destinations Survey, newspaper league tables, and the Times World University rankings among others. Universities are now required to publish ‘Key Information Sets’ (KIS) from 2012. The KIS has data from the NSS (the higher the agreeing percentages the better), the cost of university accommodation (presumably the lower the better), fees (the lower the better), graduate employment rates (the higher the better), percentage of assessment which is written exams (depends on the student) and number of ‘contact’ hours (again, depends on the student). In short if it can be measured the data is out there. And if it can’t be measured, we’ll find a way to measure it anyway, (research impact anyone?). Add to all this the information that students get from visit days, Facebook, twitter, the online student forums, friends and the phrase ‘information overload’ comes to mind. In his report Dimensions of Quality Graham Gibbs warns us about that immeasurable factor, reputation, which can override any real measure of quality. I suspect that all this information only serves to make reputation all the more important.

Read the full article on the  LLAS news blog

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Get accessing to UK postal code data for use in MapWindow.

MapWindow, Open access, open source software, quantitative methods, ,

The relationship between postal codes and latitude and longitude has only recently come into the public domain (see www.freethepostcode.org). This has been something of problem for users of GIS software.

Here are two ways to plot UK postcode data on a map in MapWindow.

  1. Method 1 is probably the easiest.
    1. Add the google Geocoder plugin by clicking on Plugin in MapWindow and selecting google geocoder.
    2. Add addresses and the points should be generated on your map. A bit more detail here. http://www.mapwindow.org/phorum/read.php?2,7770.
    3. Generally seems to work quite well, but was hanging when coping with larger amounts of data. The main problem is that it is limited to 2000 postcodes a day. A bit of a problem if you have a very large dataset.

Method 2: A work around using a free utility called batchgeo.com www.batchgeo.com

    1. Paste your data from excel into the area indicated on their website.
    2. (Optional) Validate data—good idea to check that the part it thinks is your postcode data really is.
    3. Press ‘Map Now!’
    4. You will be given the option of a public map or a private one just for you. If you give your email address you can edit your map later.
    5. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on save as google earth .kml file. NB: It took my ages to find this bit!
    6. Save the .kml file to your hard drive.
    7. Map Window does not read .kml or. kmz, so you will need to convert your .kml file to a shapefile (.shp).  You can do this online at http://www.zonums.com/online/kml2shp.php, but I’m sure that there are other converters.
    8. Save you .shp (and the partner files it generates to your hard drive.
    9. Go back to MapWindow and Add layer selecting the shapefile you have just created.

 

I’m sure that someone has been able to find another way of doing all, but these are the ways I managed to get it done.

Map Window. Click to enlarge

The yellow symbols on the map above are the locations of the Links into Languages lead universities. Click to see it more closely.

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Thoughts on Alex Seffen lecture at the Royal Geographical Society

Sustainable development

Last Thursday evening I was fortunate to be able to see Alex Seffen lecture at the Royal Geographical Society hosted by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. Steffen’s opening premise was that we have a tendency towards having a very in-depth knowledge of one particular area, yet with little understanding of how it fits into the broader scheme of things – in short we are unable to see how the world operatesas a system. Given my interest in interdisciplinarity I would be the
last person to argue with him about this.

The part I found of particular interest was Steffen’s focus on increasing densities of cities. Among other advantages increased city density reduces the need for transport by making goods and services more accessible. This is something of a contrast to the emphasis that is so often put on sustainable transport. I am not sure that the area of Southampton in which I live qualifies as a food desert,but access to services is an important issue. I live about twenty-five minutes’ walk away from my GP surgery and nearest post office; not a major problem for me personally, but a huge barrier to a person unable to walk the distances involved. My nearest high street is Woolston, or “the recession-hit Woolston High Street” as it is all too frequently referred with its boarded up shops. It is busier on a Saturday night with the takeways and bookmakers than it is on a Saturday morning.

Despite living in a city, I live further away from any post office,bank, supermarket or doctors’ surgery than I ever have living in villages and small towns. In the UK denser cities are usually associated with 1960s tower blocks which have become associated with social as well as architectural failure. Steffen showed us pictures of high density living arrangements which are much more attractive and enjoya ccess to goods and services (though I don’t recall him addressing the question of who has access to this housing.

Some more thoughts on the lecture are coming soon.

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The UK Citizenship test: Making sure that all new citizens have a good short term memory.

assessment,


Valid assessment is about measuring that which we should be trying to measure.

Phil Race Making Learning Happen.

The Guardian website quiz ‘Life in the UK: could you pass the citizenship test?’ has been provoking a lot of discussion amongst my friends. None of my friends, UK citizens or otherwise, have been able to pass the citizenship test yet.

I suspect that the Guardian has selected some ‘greatest hits’ amongst the questions and that most obscure questions have been deliberately chosen. But, if the citizenship test is really about assessing British values, British history and British culture it is a total failure. We can’t be sure that new British citizens are able to participate fully in British society, appreciate British history and understand British customs but we can be sure that all our new citizens are successful learners of trivia.

Does it measure what we are trying to measure? The Home Office need to read Phil Race.

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The case for open access to research and the problem of reputation.

OER, Open access, youtube,

For £25 you can buy a pdf copy of my 2005 article “Placing Quebec nationalisms: constructing English identities in Quebec’s Eastern Townships,” which was published in the British Journal of Canadian Studies. The article is just 16 pages long, but costs more than most 200 page books. I have no idea how many people have actually paid £25 for my article, as I do not receive royalties and I did not receive a one-off fee. The University of Southampton was not paid for my contribution and neither were the two peer reviewers. The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) which funded the research on which this work was based (with money from the UK taxpayer) won’t get any of that money either.

This is well known within academia, but those outside academia are mostly surprised to learn that neither we, nor our employers receive any payment for our work. This youtube video produced for open access week shows a conversation between a researcher who has been asked to assign copyright to the journal publisher and the publisher himself. (In practice these conversation do not happen—we just sign the form and stick it in the post).

Open access journals allow anyone with Internet access to have access to research. In some cases the researcher can pay the publisher a fee to make research open access, though this form of open access is scarcely really in the spirit of open access to research.

The aims of the open access movement are honourable. The researcher, reviewers, universities and government don’t make any money from putting research behind a paywall. This also means that the public, whether they be interested amateurs, independent scholars, advocacy groups or academics in universities without the funds to pay thousands of pounds a year for journal subscriptions—this is a key issue for academics working in poorer countries. The Open Access Pledge reads

I pledge to devote most of my reviewing and editing efforts to manuscripts destined for open access. For other manuscripts, I will restrict myself to one review by me for each review obtained for me by an outlet that is not open access.

Here, manuscripts destined for open access mean those that the authors or journal post on institutional or university repositories, or those that are made open access by the publisher within 12 months. Because I believe that access to publicly funded research should be free, I will also support open access in other ways.

At first glance it appears that the only winner in this process is the publisher. Therefore, why not just publish research on your own or your employer’s website? The answer is that academics and universities do gain from publishing research in good and prestigious journals in terms of reputation, prestige, potential for further research funding and promotion and rewards for the researcher him/herself. It is not the just the research that matters, it is where it is published. A pile of bricks in my garden is a pile of bricks—a pile of bricks in the Tate is art.

The reputation of journals is the principal barrier to Open Access.  As long as academics and their employers want to publish in the ‘best’ journals (of which few are open access) journal publishers will continue to make their profits from the labours of academics and taxpayers’ money.

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