Description of the Online Survey Sample in terms of Language and Post-school

Questions were asked in the online survey to establish a perspective for the sample in terms of language and post-school academic exposure. The same questions were posed to members of the focus group in a shortened online survey so that corresponding contextual information for describing the focus group participants could be obtained. It should be noted that the questions from the survey are not discussed in numerical order in the data analysis; rather they are discussed as part of the themes to which they bear relevance.

Question 1 of the online survey intended to establish how many of the sample had English as their mother tongue:

Figure 1 – Question 1 of Online Survey

Figure 1 above shows that of the online survey sample 40.5% of the respondents have English as a mother tongue; 54,8% of the respondents have English as their second language and for 4,8% of respondents, English is a 3rd language. Figure 1 shows that the majority of the students in the online survey sample do not have English as a first language. This is significant because the majority of students at Business School X are reading and writing academic English at a higher education post-graduate level in their second language.

Question 2 of the online survey enquired in which language/languages respondents had completed most of their schooling. Of the respondents, 71,4% had completed the majority of their schooling with English as the medium of instruction; 21,4% completed the

majority of their schooling with a combination of English and another language ( Finnish, Kiswahili and Tshivenda). From these results it can be seen that the majority of the sample had completed most of their schooling in English.

Question 3 had as its goal to determine the nature of post-school education the online survey respondents had been exposed to and to gain possible insights into respondents’ exposure to academic writing within various academic settings.

Figure 2 – Question 3 of Online Survey

57.9% of the thirty-eight respondents answering question 3 had obtained post-school qualifications from a university, 23,7% from a Technikon and 26,3% from a college. One respondent did not have a post-school qualification. Of the forty-two respondents, four did not answer the question.

In retrospect, I believe that had the wording of the fourth option been “The MBA is my first post school qualification” instead of “I do not have a post school qualification”, there may have been a more complete response as the former statement may have been more self-affirming than the latter, which could have created a negative perception of inadequacy on the part of individuals for whom the MBA was a first post-school qualification.

From the results to question 3, it becomes clear that most of the respondents in the online survey sample had attended university and could have been exposed to and had experience of academic writing in a higher education institution.

In question 4, the respondents were asked in which language they had completed their post-school qualifications, to which 41 responses were recorded. 87,6% of respondents had completed their post-school qualification in English, while 4,9% had completed their post-school qualification in a language other than English (Afrikaans) and 7,3% completed their post- school qualification in English and another language (French, Finnish and Afrikaans).

The findings show how the use of English as the language of teaching and learning becomes more predominant in higher education institutions. The results also show that most of the respondents in the online survey sample completed a university education in English, a language that is not their first language. English Second Language (ESL) students face many challenges at higher education institutions and Zamel (1995, p.515) states that students are often expected to adopt the specialised discourse of the university without the difficulties they face when learning in their second language being taken into account.

These findings are significant in terms of the literature discussed in Chapter 2 which outlines the challenges that may be faced by students who are learning in English, a language not their mother tongue.

Question 5 of the online survey was directed at ascertaining the time period that had lapsed between the respondents last formal institutional academic activity before their admission to the MBA.

Figure 3 – Question 5 of Online Survey

The graph in Figure 3 shows that 51.2% of the 41 respondents to this question had completed their most recent post-school qualification less than five years before admission to the MBA programme. 36,6% had completed their most recent post-school qualification between five and ten years prior to their admission to the MBA programme and for 12,5% of the respondents more than ten years had lapsed between their most recent post-school qualification and admission to the MBA programme. The finding was that for the majority of MBA candidates, less than five years had passed since the

The responses to Questions 1 to 5 of the online survey as discussed above provide a context for the rest of the survey in terms of respondents’ language usage and post-school academic exposure. I will now consider the broad themes that emerged from the data generated from the online survey and the focus group.