Dissertation: Final

My dissertation and the result to its questionnaire have been published online at the following address: http://ed.roquette.free.fr/wordpress/?page_id=86

It has been given the mark of 70%.

Questionnaire online

I've put my questionnaire online at this address: http://www.createsurvey.com/cgi-bin/pollfrm?m=zQ0rTm&s=53732

Feel free to answer it :)

I have publicized through emails and a Facebook group.

Questionnaire

Here is the latest version of my questionnaire, about to be published:

1. Are you:
1. An English
2. A British
3. A Foreigner
2. Are you:
1. A man
2. A woman
3. If you happen to be English, what is your ethnicity (please note that this questionnaire is completely anonymous)?
1. White English
2. White Non-English
3. Mixed White
   
4. Other: Afro-Caribean, Asian...
   
4. How many friends would you say you have?
1. 1-5
2. 6-10
3. 11-20
4. 21-50
5. 51-100
6. 101-200
7. More than 200
5. Where would you say you meet your friends at:

6. We met last night in a party, and had a great evening together. We exchanged our numbers. What word would you use to describe me?

7. Do you use any type of social network?
1. Facebook
2. Hi5
3. MySpace
4. Others
8. Do you believe that making friend with English people (please note, this is about English NOT British) is:
1. The same as with other nationalities
2. Harder than with other nationalities
3. Easier than with other nationalities
9. How many of your friends are English or British?
1. 1 out of 10
   
2. 2 out of 10
3. 3 out of 10
4. 4 out of 10
5. 5 out of 10
6. 6 out of 10
7. 7 out of 10
8. 8 out of 10
9. 9 out of 10
10. 10 out of 10
10. How often do you need to meet somebody to consider him/her as a friend?
1. Once a week
2. Once a month
3. Every 6 months
   
4. Once a year
5. Once every 2-3 year
6. Once every 5 years
7. It depends of friends
11. How many friends where around you when you last were ill (or how many do you think will be there)?
1. 1-2
2. 3-5
3. 5-10
4. 10-20
12. With the people you call your friends, do you rather tend to "see them once a year and go climb a mountain" (meet them rarely and do something unusual) or see them everyday at work/uni as part of your routine?
1. I see them rarely and do unusual thing
2. I see them regularly as part of my routine
3. I see them ore unusual, but also a bit of routine
4. More routine but also some unusual
   

Update: 23/05

I'm finally back on this blog to work it out a lot more intensively in the coming two weeks. You can expect a lot more fresh content, and i will be monitoring your comments.

Tonight, while having a conversation with Alifa, a South-African student who has been in the UK for the past 17 years, I wrote down a few of a her sentences which i found very telling:

• On regard to my conception of the glass-wall: With foreigners "It is always the same conversation". She meant that she heard this conversation again and again.
• "I've met foreign people studying English, and their teachers tell them 'if you want to speak, go out in a pub'"
• "It is the same problem for the second or third generation immigrants I am with in my course, they find it hard to speak with the English"
• I asked: How many friends do you have here: "10". How many English friends do you have: "1"
  

I will probably be interviewing Alifa in greater length in the coming week to find out more about her experience.

My teacher Paul Slater has kindly forwarded the address of this blog to his student in Master of TESOL (Teaching English as a Second Language), and I have had interesting comments on what was i enclosing as part of my plan.
Here are a few clarifications that I've written as an answer in the comment section:

• As an answer to Henri Page, on what was i defining as "the English man": what i call the "average English-man" is any working to middle class white male, with a relatively low education or a low interest in education (understand: he went through his studies remembering little and changing even less), a non-existent foreign experience/interest (although he could have learned some French/German back in school), whose social activities runs around a mix of football/pub/cars/clubs. He may be working, but could as well be a student at Uni (although i have the theory that if a student he will open up after working a few years). Please note that I am NOT focusing on the Lads/Chavs/Yobs phenomenons but on a larger overall group.

• Dasos pointed out that "I feel that commenting about 'those people' isn't the way forward. I can detect the attitude / outlook of 'us and them,' ("Why is it that I can't get along with the English man?" "I don't understand him / them.") and there has to be something more to all of this than that". While i do agree with him that there is a risk in this type of thinking I answered him that "This is precisely what i am interested to look into: Why do we have this feeling of them and us? Why only in England? What makes the English man so special in this matter? Why is it that in other cultures the missing bricks of a foreigner's integration are easier to find out? What are the principles to follow that could help us to integrate? What do English people do to accept and appreciate each others?"

Overall it sounds that i am getting great intellectual feedback from the people i am talking with. However i still need to establish a sets of questions for my interviews to structure what I am looking for.
If you have any suggestion or critics regarding my approach and the questions that i am asking please feel entirely free to use the comment section as I'm really looking forward to making it as interactive as possible.

Independancy

Marianne made a useful comment on my post "plan":

Have you heard this sentence "I don't wanna get involved."? I have the feeling that sometime people are happy to have an informal chat ie talk about the weather or the train being late...again, just scraping the surface. However, they don't seem to be willing to give their point of view and speak out loud and clear. Paul, Xin and I were talking about peer pressure the other day. Are the English scared to look like "prats"?

From my research and reflexion so far, I think this is the mark of an intrinsic component of being English: Be Independent, and avoid at any cost walking on somebody's else toes!

To make the idea more apprehensible, we can compare people's involvement in conversation with another extreme: The French.
Whenever discussing a random topic in France, it is considered a mark of politeness and respect to involve and say something interesting and meaningful. Otherwise, you could end up being considered as the lowest form of life walking on the pretty face of France (along with the fast-food eating American): The witless dumb average fucker (and you would start watching the TV channel TF1).

Now, compare with the English shortcut known as "The Weather Talk".
The Weather is a "conversation tool" used to show your politeness and respectability by following the first and most important rule of conversation ("Start talking about the weather"), but also to fill blanks in conversation, or to simply acknowledge somebody's presence ("Beautiful day isn't it").

Most aspects of relationships in this country are just so tainted with this major rule of independence that i see it as the major turnoff for any foreigner willing to make an English friend.

We can consider this practice as extreme politeness, which has forced the British to use an infinite rulebook of unspoken practices, aimed at getting as far as possible in NOT even taking the remotest risk to appear as impolite and minding someone's else business.

An example given by Fox in her book "watching the English" is that people try to guess each other's profession when meeting in a party, dinner... as for some reason it is not recommended to be asking straightaway "So what do you do for a living?".
So Mrs Fox goes on describing how conversations get shaped in a guessing-game where each participant make their best to ask questions that sounds as neutral as possible, but are in fact aimed at having you to uncover your activity.

This could sounds like a funny culture-related game, but for the foreigner coming to England and trying to make new friends, it presents a nightmare: How to actually make a meaningful contact with the locals?
The only locals you may stand a chance to make more of a meaningful contact are those who have lived abroad for some time, which, sadly, isn't that common nowadays.

That forces most of us, foreigners, to live with other foreigners, until we understand a few of the local friend making rules.
One of them is The Pub. I'll describe The Pub in a further post, but we could imagine the pub as the only place in the English life where "normal out-of-england" friend making rules apply.

Go to a pub. Get pissed. Brag with the other idiots. Sing.
You're English now.

MFL: "Merde" to foreign languages

Marianne, one of my classmates in EL312, has been the first one to jump the gap, and has opened her own blog on blogger.
She is looking at the current society trend where more and more British people are reluctant to learn a foreign language, specially at the lowest income level.
It is a true problem for Britain, and one whose reflect is composed of many different causes.
Her blog can be found at this address: http://mflinbritain.blogspot.com/

Plan

Since the start of this essay and the blog that comes along with it I had the issue of finding a proper plan for it.
Thanks to Paul Slater, my tutor and teacher for this module, we've managed to identify what were the core elements which were of interest in this subject.
So what is exactly preventing people to get along when one is a foreigner and the other a british?

To make sure we are doing it right, it is best to "scoop large". So i believe that at first, we need to understand what is exactly friendship, since what comes between english and foreigners actually prevent it to happen.
There is a point in looking at what does people see as friendship, throughout their cultures, their age, their social class, or anything else that could be relevant.
My teenage cousin might say that she has 20 friends, my second year classmate at uni will probably venture for 50 or 60, while I'd say I've 10 at the best.
Are we more or less sociable?
Or is it that we define friendship differently?

Secondly, a huge influence in friendship making is the actual bonding process where people get together and start having "common sympathetic feelings" for each other. Usually this implies a feeling of communality (they share something together: they went to the same school, love the same sport, have the same humor...). However you may share commonalities with other people that you may not be friend with: You just don't happen to be friend with everybody at work, or with people that went to holidays to Corfou.
This implies that there is more to it than meet the eye.

This bond making seems quite specific in the British context: It happens mostly in pub, while clubbing, having BBQs, or through absorbing drinks and drugs.
This is obviously a major difference with the foreigners, since their societies do not put such limitations. This particularity is likely to become my third part of study in this essay.

In fact i will probably be looking in part two at how does the British view themselves in terms of friendship-making, while the third part will focus on the differences between this approach, the foreigner's one, and what confusion comes out of it.