The Students and Instructors of Languages at Community Colleges (SILCC) Surveys

Introduction

• The Students and Instructors of Languages at Community Colleges (SILCC) Surveys were designed in consultation with an expert panel of community college language instructors, researchers and administrators. Two survey instruments were developed – one for students and one for instructors – in order to better understand the demographics and motivations of community college language students, as well as the experiences and pedagogical methodologies of community college language instructors. In this repository, you will find the anonymized survey data from the administration of the survey in Fall 2015, the survey instruments, and findings from the surveys.

Data

• In the "data" folder, you will find two data sets; one for the results of student surveys (1,756 responses) and the other for the results of instructor surveys (140 responses). See the following documents for more information about the data sets and the summary results.

  1. Ketcham, E., Funk, A., & Nagano, T. (2017). Students and Instructors of Languages at Community Colleges (SILCC) Surveys: Results from the Student Surveys, Fall 2015. Retrieved from www.cilc.gc.cuny.edu/lccn (download the slides)
  2. Ketcham, E., Nagano, T., & Funk, A. (2017). Students and Instructors of Languages at Community Colleges (SILCC) Surveys: Results from the Instructor Surveys, Fall 2015. Retrieved from www.cilc.gc.cuny.edu/lccn (download the slides)

Codebooks

• Two codebooks (one for the student data and the other for the instructor data) are saved in the "codebooks" folder.

Survey instruments

• The original survey instruments, written in LaTeX, are saved in the "survey" folder. The original LaTeX sources are also saved in the same folder.

More information about the SILCC Surveys

• A few articles have been published about the results of the Students and Instructors of Languages at Community Colleges (SILCC) Surveys.

  1. Ketcham, E., Nagano, T., & Funk, A. (2020). Students of Languages at Community Colleges: Who Studies Which Languages and Why?. ADFL Bulletin, 46(1), 56-70.
  2. Nagano, T., Ketcham, E., & Funk, A. (2019). Why do Heritage Language Speakers Opt out of Their Own Heritage Language?: A Survey-based Study of Heritage Language Learners at Community Colleges. Heritage Language Journal, 16(3), 318-339.
  3. Nagano, T., Funk, A., & Ketcham, E. (2017). Modern Language Instruction at Community College: A Survey-based Study of Modern Language Instructors. Foreign Language Annals, 50(3), 621-631.