This section gives an overview of the group of informants who volunteered to par-ticipate in the project. The overview is given because it was a matter of considerable debate whom to enlist as informants, as the object of investigation in the project, i.e.
whom to consider Danish students.
Since one of the theories that are used in this study, the theory of cross-linguistic influence, claims that one’s already acquired languages influence the ac-quisition of a new language, it is a legitimate question to ask whether and if so, how, to include bilingual7 students as informants. Based on this theory, it is plausible that bilingual students face different challenges with English than Danish monolingual students do.
7 The term bilingual here refers to people who acquired two or more languages in their child-hood, one of the languages being Danish. That is, the term implies early childhood bi- or multilingualism. By the time of participating in this study, all the informants had become bi- or multilingual to some extent.
Also for this reason, and as described in Section 3.2.1.1, a survey of the Danish students’ educational background was conducted from the academic year 2012-2013 onwards. One of the purposes of this survey was to uncover the linguistic back-ground of the informants so that a decision could be made as to the selection of informants.
Table 2-4 displays the statistics of the Danish informants’ linguistic back-ground. Since not all the informants who have contributed to the database in one way or another responded to the survey on educational background, the number of bilingual informants might be somewhat larger. The informants were not asked how they acquired the languages which they reported, nor were they asked about the level of mastery of their languages in childhood.
Table 2-4: The Danish informants’ linguistic background Academic
Languages reported apart from Danish
2012-2013 58 (52) 6 Arabic, Armenian, Bosnian, Dari, English, Faroese, French, Ger-man, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Korean, Mandinka, Romanian, Somali, Spanish, Swahili, Swe-dish, Swiss German, Tamil, Thai, English in childhood. However, it seems unlikely that it should reflect having been brought up in an (at least partially) English-speaking household. It is more likely a reflection of having picked up English from for instance television and computer games. The same is probably true of the reports on other closely related languages, such as German and Swedish. These languages are not only related to Danish, but are also in close geographical proximity to Denmark, which makes it easy to pick them up for people who grow up or live in the border areas. Nevertheless, these informants are included in the group of reportedly bilingual informants. No data on their linguistic background are available for the Slovene and Serbian informants.
After lengthy deliberation, I decided that the objective of this project was to investigate the acquisition of English of the “average” Danish student, “average”
being defined as a student who has been brought up in the Danish education system regardless of ethnic or geographical origin, citizenship and regardless of being bi- or monolingual in childhood. The Danish education system encompasses for the pur-pose of this study the schools in the overseas areas of the Kingdom of Denmark, namely Greenland and the Faroe Islands, where Danish is an obligatory language to learn.
Hence, only students that did not attend Danish schools in their childhood and adolescence were excluded from the study. Three such informants were encountered during the project. All other informants were “lumped” together in the analyses.
After this decision had been reached, the potential informants from before 2012 could also participate in the project even though their linguistic background was not known, only that they attended the Danish education system.
The reason for this decision was partly statistical, partly pedagogical. It was statistical because it was discovered that only about 25% of the informants had a reportedly bilingual background, and they had a varied background involving vari-ous languages, even English, apart from Danish. Consequently, it would have made little sense statistically to analyse the group of bilingual students separately from the group of monolingual students because the bilingual group was rather heterogeneous and none of its subgroups was represented by a statistically significant number of informants.
The decision not to remove the bilingual informants from the study was also made on pedagogical grounds because one of the goals of the project was to provide insights for the improvement of the teaching of English. Since the bilingual students were and would continue to be an inalienable part of the classroom, the insights should also benefit them.
2.7.1 The demographics of the informants
In all three countries in which the project collected data, Denmark, Slovenia and Serbia, freshmen were recruited as informants for the project. This had to do with the fact that English Grammar and Production of Written Texts were the only cours-es that specifically targeted the improvement of the Danish students’ linguistic abili-ties, and these courses were offered to freshmen.
Thus, as far as the Danish informants were concerned, the choice of freshmen was given, and in order to have a corps of comparable informants, freshmen had to be recruited in Slovenia and Serbia as well. Table 2-5 summarises the basic demo-graphic data of the informants. The number of informants reflects the total number of informants that have contributed to at least one field of the database in a given
academic year. The age of the informants was their age at the start of the respective academic year.
Table 2-5: Basic demographic data of the informants
Academic year Danish informants Slovene informants Serbian informants
♀ ♂ Avg. age ♀ ♂ Avg. age ♀ ♂ Avg. age 2009-2010 39 17 22.07
2010-2011 40 24 21.49 2011-2012 54 43 21.61 2012-2013 35 23 21.79 2013-2014 62 56 21.37
2014-2015 50 33 21.88 10 7 n/a
2015-2016 73 45 21.48 7 4 19.69 21 2 19.85
Total 353 241 17 11 21 2
645 594 28 23
The fact that the Danish informants were on average about two years older than both the Slovene and Serbian informants may have the following reason.
As is standard in Europe, altogether 12 years of education in primary and sec-ondary school is considered mandatory in Denmark in order to gain access to the tertiary level of education (Danish Ministry of Education 2017a). Children start school at the age of six, and primary school is meant to consist of nine grades, and secondary school of three grades.
However, most Danish children attend a so-called year zero in school as well, and some also an extra tenth year. Thus, they already tend to be one year older than their Slovene and Serbian counterparts are when finishing their secondary education.
Furthermore, it is customary in Denmark to take a sabbatical year before entering a university, which is to my knowledge not as common in other countries.