Research of International Students in the University

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Aim of the Research

This research is aimed to know the opinions of other Stipendium Hungaricum Students on how they perceive difficulties with language barriers? Whether they get along with difficult situations easily or they are often confused with it and ask someone for help? Is the language barriers influences the reputation of FIMB and Hungary? What are their recommendations to improve the service sector? We are going to seek the answers for these questions.

Method of Research

We can easily get answers to these questions with the help of online questionnaire, as it is the cheapest and time saving method. However , before constructing the quiz, I did a short literature review from the course book of research methodology, in order to build well- structured survey quiz and I concluded for myself that the questions have to be:

- clear , succinct ;

- easy for respondent to answer ( mostly preferred to ask close ended questions);

- short and to the point;

( Sekaran, U & Bougrie R ,2010)

Proper questionnaire construction enabled me to find out necessary information from my respondents answers. There are also can be disadvantages of it: if respondent is unwilling to answer, thus can introduce bias or unstructured questions can cause to misunderstandings and etc. However , I can confidently say that, SH students were really engaged to fill my questionnaire, even they made a lot of suggestions and recommendations to solve this problem.

Limitations

Unfortunately, during the data collection period, I realized, because of the program was established recently, there were lack of sources and information about the general background information as well as experiences and opinions of other members of Stipendium Hungaricum Students studying in different universities.

Structure of report

The report is based on the questionnaire. Since I am one of the SH student it was very easy for me to ask my friends to fill questionnaire . It does not required a lot effort, as we are with them almost every day and we know each other very well.

The sample of seven SH students were involved in my survey and twelve questions were asked. Structure of questions were combined on the basis of both open (recommendations) and mostly close ended (multiple choice) questions. The link for the questionnaire:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1CGHpvsPt0A66hkIYl5BNMScyVVjtmJBTl7wIQcOb6E8/viewform.

Due to my interest to statistics, I quickly interpreted all the answers of respondents and categorized them group by group. I was eager and quite engaged in this process to know the results of my friends in terms of BBS and conclude their recommendations.

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Collected Answers

Now let us examine what were the results of questionnaire, which my friends filled in. In the first question I asked how frequently they use library services, and most of students responded “once a week”. Asking it, I wanted to know how often they face with language problems in library.

Question 3 focuses on how librarians are helpful for international students (for example, on finding a book, whether they speak English etc.). By asking this question, I wanted to know, whether my friends are satisfied with library service. As you can see from the pie chart, 3 students out of 7 answered that it takes time to explain what they want from the librarian, while other remaining 50%-50% replied that librarians do not understand English and other half answered positively.[pic 6]

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Questions 4,5,6,7 were mainly dealing with how often do students use canteen services, if more than once are they satisfied or not, are the servers speak English or in Hungarian and finally what are their recommendations on reducing language barriers in the canteen services. According to the results, it was obvious that students usually go to the canteen 4-5 times per week, more often comparing with library ( once a week). In Question 6 I asked do kitchen servers speak with students in Hungarian or in English, and as it is indicated in the bar chart only 1 person stated that , servers speak in English while rendering a service , but remaining 6 people answered that canteen ladies speaks only in Hungarian.

[pic 8][pic 9]

Even, one girl gave bright example for it what she had experienced recently: actually, she is Muslim and strictly follows religious rules. One day she was so hungry after classes and ordered meat with rice in the canteen. To her shock, it turned out that the meat was pork. She was very abused and upset. Finally, she realized that the woman who served her do not understand English at all. From that time, she never buys food from our school kitchen. Thus, if the service staff does not understand what we need, it is no choice for us to bother other Hungarian people to make a choice for us on food. The survey showed, that 3 out 7 would ask help from others, while 4 people could manage it by themselves.

Last series of questions, from 8-11 were concentrating on the language barriers in online educational websites, leaflets or news journals of the university, that SH student can face while studying in FIMB. How frequently do they face with the posters and billboards in English within the university, and in which language do they get important information: Question 10 was very essential for me to know in which language do they get messages from the Neptun: in Hungarian or in English? Even in English courses, all of the names of the subjects or exam registration everything is in Hungarian. As to prove, according to the results of questionnaire 100 % of respondents stated that they get messages, which most of them are in Hungarian.

As for the 11 question, I asked them if they have any suggestions to overcome language issues. I received two recommendations that I will explain in the next section of this report.

Recommendations

According to the questionnaire, I received some recommendations from Stipendium Hugaricum Students on ways how to overcome language difficulties in this school for the future. There are two main options of it which were offered:

First option from one of candidates was, that we, foreign students have to learn