11/20 Survey Report on HOURS (English Cafe)

A survey about HOURS (English cafe)


Introduction
HOURS, the only English cafe run by Chongshin University, aims at giving opportunities for learning English to students. However, HOURS is considered as a non-English cafe by most of Chongshin students. In this situation, there has been lots of calls from them for the improvement of HOURS. To make HOURS a better place for the students, the researcher carried out a survey. The two biggest questions of the survey are as follows: (1) “how often do the students visit HOURS?” and (2) “what do they do when they come to HOURS?”

Method
The researcher distributed a questionnaire, which consisted of 20 items and was largely composed of open-ended or closed-ended questions. The survey asked 6 questions about how often the students visit HOURS. Also, the survey asked what they usually do in HOURS. It included 4 questions about buying food, 6 questions about studying, 4 questions about English programs. The researcher predicted that English Education students would mostly visit HOURS to buy food. The survey was conducted for two days from 25th to 26th, and 21 students from four different departments, such as English/History/Early Childhood Education and Theology, fully responded.

Frequency of visiting HOURS
According to the result, 15 students out of 21 were willing to visit HOURS. Most of them usually came to the cafe about one or two times a week, and 8 students came one or three times a day. Also, nearly all the students majoring in Education wanted to visit the cafe, while a half of Theology department students were uninterested in coming because of English problems. It indicates that an effective efforts to maximize their use of the language will be needed.

Food
The most strongest reason that students came to HOURS for was to buy the cafe foods. 14 students answered that the foods were quite satisfying, so it was unnecessary to change or improve the menu. 43% of the respondents chose snacks as their favorite refreshments, 26% for bread, and 22% for drinks; however, 7 students gave a different opinion. They did not buy any food because of personal preference, environmental reasons such as a location or sanitary conditions, and linguistic problems. Here, some people suggested that English cafe develop lots of set menus or different kinds of sandwiches. Although most of the students thought the foods was okay, it seems more varied food menus will be helpful for improving HOURS management.

Study
9 students liked to study in the cafe with their friends or on their own. However, surprisingly, a number of students had trouble in studying there regardless of learning types like pairs or groups. First of all, they felt desks and chairs were not appropriate for studying because they were too low. In addition, they were not able to study since some people made much noise and consequently made them uncomfortable. This shows that a strict rule which can make the students less noisy will have to be implemented any time soon.

English programs
The students’ opinions about the English programs were divided into almost half-and-half. 11 students responded positively to the programs; they believed that most of the programs would improve their English skills. The results ranked professor John’s Movies Nights the number one place among five other programs. Meanwhile, 10 students said they did not participate in the programs because they were not aware of the program itself or felt uninterested. Because a few of them did not even know what programs were run, public relations exercises should be done in the near future.

Conclusion
On the whole, the survey results showed that several systematic matters with which HOURS had had problems should be dealt with right away. Since two-thirds of the participants visited HOURS regularly to buy some food, the cafe needs to maintain the status quo of itself as well as to enhance the sanitary conditions in order not to lose its popularity. Also, by accepting minority opinions from theology students, an effective way to encourage them to use HOURS should be considered. Furthermore, not only should excessive noise be controlled for whom to study but also some movements for promoting the English programs will have to be conducted.

10/2 Literature Selection Essay

Image credit: Lucretious Title: Easily forgettable emotions that should be taught in high schools

There are a plenty of emotions that all human beings have, and these can be largely categorized by two, bad and good. The bad emotions include hatred, jealousy or anger, while the good ones contain love, compassion or joy. Since these emotions are general feelings and one of the human natures, they should be considered as a matter of course; however, unfortunately, the former emotions are often judged to be the wrong thing to be avoided only because they have negative meanings. Hence many teachers at education field do not teach them even though they shouldn’t. For this reason, I strongly think that a poem ‘Fire and Ice’ which covers the bad emotions, especially a ‘desire’ and ‘hate’, should be used as a teaching material in many classrooms. There are two grounds for supporting the idea of teaching ‘Fire and Ice’ in highschools.

First and foremost, the message of the poem is appropriate for the students. The message is about two different feelings of the ‘desire’ and ‘hate’ as mentioned above, and I correlated them with the students’ relationships. They are living in many relationships such as with boy or girl friends, just friends, families, and teachers. While the first one is closely related to the ‘desire’ or ‘fire’, the rest is about the ‘hate‘ or ‘ice.’ First, the highschool students are very sensitive when they are told about sexual matters, so they can possibly think about their relationships if I introduce the poem. The important thing here is that I should let them know the danger of physical sins. Because they are too young to tell good relationships, they are prone to going the wrong way sexually. Second, the students are not isolated from their friends, families, or their teachers, so they could probably have a mind of hatred, jealousy or anger toward them. Therefore, it is significant to teach them the fact that the feelings of hate are one of the human natures but are to be rejected.

Additionally, the language of the poem is suitable for the highschool students. Above all, the level of difficulty that the speaker says is appropriate to learn. The difficult vocabulary ,for example, can be narrowed down to three—’hold with’, ‘perish’, and ‘suffice’. I think the students in that age are able to study the words based on their levels. They are not that easy as well as challenging enough. Second, because the ‘desire’ and ‘hate’ are described as the concepts of ‘fire’ and ‘ice’, this must be easy for the students to match the abstract senses to the concrete images. In accordance with this match, the students can imagine the two serious emotions with visual materials including pictures or videos.

To sum up, I have been talking about why highschool students should learn ‘Fire and Ice’ by giving two reasons. First, the message of the poem can be a proper matter to discuss in the classroom. Since the students have many relationships, they can easily find and understand a sense of desire and hate as they interact with other people. Second, the language of the poem is appropriate to learn. The three words are suitable for them to study, and concepts of fire and ice