In this section38, I describe some of the students’ general background factors: 1) gender, 2) the
proportion of language vs. non-language majors, 3) the grade of starting to study English, 4) first language, 5) year of birth and 6) year of graduation from upper secondary school. Furthermore, whenever relevant, distributions are compared within the student groups, which provides information about the student population and explains which features they share. Section 6.2.2 discusses the students’ exposure to English, their school marks and their level of engagement with English.
Of the 319 students who participated in the study, 171 were male and 148 female. Although the distribution of gender across the entire student population is fairly even (53.6% men and 46.4% women), this is not the case when the results are analysed across the student groups. There were more women than men in the English Major, Grammar and Humanities groups and more men than women in the Computer Science and Technology group. The only group where the distribution of gender was even was the Visual Arts group. This is visualised in Figure 10.
Figure 10. The number of men and women in the various student groups
38 Throughout this section and the rest of this study, statistical test scores are given whenever they were run
(cf. De Costa 2015, 251); when no inferential test scores are given, the results are based on analysing descriptive data. This is usually the case when the pattern is clear to the eye or when a test is not a feasible approach due to the small expected or observed values (e.g. below 5), or when inferential statistics are not appropriate.
Of the 319 students, 48 students (15%) majored or minored in a language-related subject, while 271 students (85%) studied a subject not related to languages. Obviously, all the 35 students from the English Major group had a language-related subject, but also nine students in the Grammar group and four students in the Humanities group majored in a language-related subject. These students included four students of Finnish and one student each of German, Spanish, Italian, Swedish/Hungarian, Russian, Nordic languages, Dutch, Slavic languages and General linguistics. The non-language related subject group comprised the Visual Arts, Computer Science and Technology groups together with the remainder of the Humanities and Grammar group students. Of the 48 students who studied a language-related subject, only 7 were men and 41 were women; in the non-language related group, 107 students were female and 164 male.
All the participants had started their English studies in primary school. The majority (79%) had started studying English in grade 3 (at the age of 9), while another large group of students (18%) had started English two years later, in grade 5. Only a few students had started English in grades 2, 4 and 6. The distribution is presented in Figure 11. Three students did not indicate when they had started their English studies. The students’ gender distribution was even across the years of starting English, but while other student groups had fairly even distributions, Visual Arts students and English Majors were somewhat different. Of the 12 Visual Arts students, all but one had started their studies in grade 3. In the English Major group, somewhat surprisingly, there were proportionally more students who had started their English studies late: 31% of the English Majors had started their English in grade 5 instead of the more common grade 3 (69% of the English Majors). This means that almost a third of the students who studied English as their main or secondary subject had started with another foreign language, for example German or French.
In the student population, 298 students (93.4%) spoke Finnish as their first language, while 16 (5%) were Swedish-speaking (see Figure 12). Two students were bilingual39 in Finnish and
Swedish, and three were bilingual in Finnish and another language: Russian, German and Punjabi. Note that these are the students’ self-reported first languages; all the students in the study spoke at least Finnish, Swedish and English (see Section 5.2). The distribution of the first language is not even across student groups: almost all of the Swedish-speaking students were 39 Technically, most people in Finland are multilingual, with at least three languages (e.g. Cook 2016; Klein
1995; cf. Opetushallitus 2003; 2015). Here, however, I use the term bilingual to refer to people who self- identified themselves with two L1s. For various ways of defining bilingualism, see e.g. Brown and Larson-Hall
in the Technology group (14 out of 16), and the Visual Arts and Computer Science groups consisted of only Finnish-speakers. Four of the five bilinguals were women, but in the Finnish- and Swedish-speaking groups, gender was evenly distributed.
Figure 11. The grade when student participants started studying English at school
The students’ year of birth ranged from 1955 to 1985. Ten students had been born in the 1950s or 1960s, 112 in the 1970s and 197 in the 1980s. Thus, the students were 18-48 years old at the time of participation40. Figure 13 presents the range in the year of birth: most students had been
born between 1976 and 1985, with the greatest peaks in the years 1981 and 1982. However, the distribution was not even in the student groups: there were proportionally more younger students in the English Major and Visual Arts groups. The English Major group, in particular, had more students who had been born after 1982 than any other group. This may be because the course they took was intended for first-year students, while there was no specification for when to take the course in the other groups. In this study, women were a little younger than men: the median year of birth for women was 1981 and for men, 1980, while the mode was 1982 for women and 1981 for men. Thus, on average, women were 22 years old, while men were 23 years old at the time of participation41.
Figure 13. The distribution of the students’ year of birth
The time from having taken the matriculation examination and having graduated from upper secondary school varied from 1975 to the previous spring (2003). However, the majority of
40 For how the students’ age was counted, see Footnote 32.
students had completed their matriculation examination one to five years before the time of participation (see Figure 14). This means that most students had been taught according to the 1994 curriculum, and only a minority had studied according to the 1985 curriculum (see Section 5.3).
Figure 14. The distribution of the students’ year of matriculation examination
To summarise, the participants were predominantly Finnish-speaking, had typically started studying English in grade 3 and were in their early twenties, having entered the university a few years after upper secondary school, but some participants were already much older and had had a long gap between upper secondary school and university. While women were overrepresented in language-major groups, men were overrepresented in the Computer Science and Technology groups.