Applied Linguistics and Language Teacher Education by Nat Bartels

48 THE IMPACT OF LANGUAGE VARIATIONstudied. Sociolinguistics once again gets a respectable rating with 40.4% including itin their ‘compulsory course’ list, and a further 45.6% rating it as ‘important butshould not be compulsory’ compared with the all available course means of 65.2%(SD = 21.1) and 24.6% (SD = 13.8) respectively.A number of respondents admitted to knowing little about Sociolinguistics until theytook the course, which helps to explain why some currently unavailable courses, such assemiotics, were rejected as potential curriculum items: ‘I even had to go away and checkwhat semiotics is’, confesses one confused respondent, while another writes, ‘I am notactually sure what genre analysis is’.The general conclusion we must draw thus far is that students found their courses tobe, on the whole, appropriate, and are reluctant to trade satisfactory courses for thosewhich they know little about. However, one frequent comment concerns the possibilityof selecting options, or elective courses:I didn’t have any choice in what courses I took. I would have liked to take some of theothers offered through the on campus program. ie. Psycholinguistics, CorpusLinguistics. etcMany of these courses were not offered as part of the distance programme in Korea. Iselected the “no opinion” option for all of these but would have certainly liked theopportunity to have taken a few of them in my course of study.Since undertaking this study we have introduced options to the programme.5.4. Further Views of SociolinguisticsTo further test opinion of Sociolinguistics, our first query in Section C of thequestionnaire asked whether this topic should be retained as a compulsory course,redesignated as an option or dropped from the programme. Figure 1 shows the results:Figure 1. Respondents’ views on the future status of Sociolinguistics. N = 80.