Premise

It may seem strange to ask you to interview
     -   people you know (parents, friends, neighbors, classmates...)
     -   in your own language.

After all, aren't you trying to learn ANOTHER language and culture?

Yes, of course.  But you cannot understand others until you REALLY understand yourself.  This task helps you do just that.

If your questions are really able to get you inside your foreign interlocutor's mind, they will also help you get inside the mind of the people you know.

Because it is probable that, although you may know them well, you don't appreciate their culture because it is yours, and you have never stopped to examine how “strange” your culture is.  You have always considered it normal, “what is” -- just like a fish pays no attention to water because it is in it all the time.  A fish realizes that water exists only when it leaves the sea; and YOU realize what your culture is only when you leave your country for a trip abroad, or when (as in this case) you try to look at your culture with the eyes of someone who is outside of it.

If, on the other hand, your questionnaire asks banal questions (“Do you like music?” “What's your favorite food?”) or questions about habits (“Do you and your friends 'help each other' during exams?”, “At what age do young people leave home in your country?”) but not about the WHY of those habits, then it will not get you inside the mind of your foreign interlocutor.  And when you translate it into your own language and interview people you know, you learn nothing. The answers are the answers you knew anyway.

So, if your questionnaire is not good, this exercise is worth nothing.  It does not help you acquire a point of comparison that you can use in the next exercise, when you try to understand the culture of people speaking another language.

So the indications below (“How to write your Report”) presuppose that you have made a questionnaire that really helps you understand other cultures (and also your own).  If your questionnaire does not do this, you cannot write your Report. 

What should you do then?  Change your questions, first in the L2 and then in your own language – change them as many times as necessary, until you find questions that give you the answers you need to write your Report.

How to write your report

1. Start with the conclusion. Say immediately what your interviews in your native language showed you about your native culture. Say whether this insight is new to you or whether you already realized this particularity with respect to your native culture.

2. Explain how you got your data. It is not necessary to list your questions since you will attach the questionnaire (in your own language) that you used.  But it IS necessary to explain what your questionnaire tried to show, who you interviewed (and where and when), what particular reactions the people had (if any). If you have made not an audio recording but a video recording, much of this information will appear in the video – but say it anyway, because there are a lot of things to see in the video and in your Report you have to decide what is essential.

3. Explain the responses to your questionnaire that you hypothesized.

4. Then explain
        -- if your hypotheses were verified;
        -- if the answers you got reveal a particular cultural mind-set. If so, say what that mind-set is. Then say if you think it is typical of most of the people in your interviewees' country, or if it is just a stereotype or even just a myth.

5. Repeat briefly the conclusion you already gave at the beginning. Then say what this experience is worth and if the knowledge you got is knowledge that will help you in life. DO NOT say that you interviewed too few people to make a valid statistic – this is obvious since the task serves to learn a method, not to produce scientific evidence.

     GIVE YOUR REPORT TO YOUR GROUP LEADER, WITH YOUR TRANSLATED QUESTIONNAIRE AND THE AUDIO OR VIDEO RECORDING OF AT LEAST ONE INTERVIEW.