Hokay, so I've been wondering about the necessity of having such a detailed language selection at attending for a while now, but an incident last week reminded me of it. A student came in to make an appointment and the attendant, not me but I did witness it, asked for the student's native language and because it wasn't on the list, it became a bit awkward w/ the student asking why it was necessary and so on. The attendant did a good job of explaining the reasons as best he knew them, but the student wound up saying he didn't want to make an appointment because of the language issue. Well, luckily, the attendant was able to persuade the student to make an appointment and everything was hunky-dory. My point is, why should it be so difficult and how can we fix that. While the majority of students have little or no problem w/ this, and a few will eventually have issues w/ it.
What we need is a clear explanation that defines why we need this information that the student’s will accept and not take it as some kind of judgment or different treatment because of their language status. I think this should be consistent and clear to all attendants so that we can avoid these problems. Granted, while we can’t please everyone, we can at least show a bit more consistency and have a clear-cut policy to present to the students.
The other part of this issue that I keep trying to get my head around is the need to be some damn specific in the first place. Can’t we just list students as NNS students so that our consultants can be aware of each student’s possible needs? This would immediately eliminate the before mentioned episode because all the attendant would have needed to do was to list him as a NNS student and finish the appointment.
I just thought that this could be improved in some way, but I know my suggestions might be impractical or untenable because of certain factors that I am not aware of. End of rant…Later
Jason, thanks for raising this issue on your blog and Adam's-- one that challenges all of us. I recognize the difficulty of asking such a personal question about a student as they make an appointment (and am really interested in the best ways we can ask it without offending anyone; I know I keep changing how I ask it), but I fear your solution of just listing students as NNS doesn't work either. First, to be fair and to not just assume anything, we'd need to ask the NS vs NNS question of everyone (like we do the first language question), so the folks who get upset would get upset at this question too. And, secondly, doesn't grouping all NNS together overgeneralize their experience (since spanish speakers tend to have different challenges than japanese speakers). And, finally, I believe that reporting on the huge range of first languages makes a powerful argument to the U's administration about the diversity of students we see (in addition to English, we have 41 other languages represented this semester). Administrators tend to assume we see only NNS (when we actually see only about 20-25% NNS) and they tend to assume all NNS are Chinese (the biggest group, but looking historically, it is fascinating to see what new populations we are now seeing: like Somali and Russian). So, my answer to the question of why we collect this data is to educate the University about the diversity of students we see. I also remind students that all personal information is kept confidential and reported only in aggregate ways. I hope this helps.
Posted by: Kirsten at December 4, 2005 7:18 PM