Research Methods in Language Teaching and Learning - Группа авторов

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of balancing my project’s aims and search for relevant data with the freedom needed for participants to express their own priorities and perspectives). Furthermore, I was present and available within the research setting (i.e., the school) as data collection started, enabling me to check my instructions with the participants on a face-to-face basis and answer the few queries that emerged (for example, refining my guidelines at the diarists’ request; see “Structured or Unstructured Diaries?” above). Additionally, I was able to check a sample diary entry for each diarist early in the study, reassuring them as to its value to the research (Hall, 2008; see also Alaszewski, 2006). Diarists are more likely to be confident from the outset in what they are doing if they can see it meets the needs of the research. This confidence and clarity consequently supports and enhances their participation in a project, while confusion is clearly demotivating.

      Moreover, pursuing a diary approach in conjunction with other methods of data collection also provided me with the opportunity to further develop the constructive researcher–participant relationships that were so central to maintaining the diarists’ participation in the study. In the diary-interview method that I pursued, participant diaries were collected and read on a daily basis as the starting point for follow-up interviews. The interviews, also daily, further explored the diarists’ reported experiences and perspectives on classroom life, participation in the interviews thereby reinforcing, for the diarists, the value of their perspectives for my own understanding of their classroom, and highlighting, for them, the importance of their contribution to the project. In the interviews, the participants and I could also identify and iron out any final methodological difficulties within the project (see also Zimmerman & Wieder, 1977), again helping to maintain their participation in the research.

      Finally, I needed to consider whether the diarists should be paid or otherwise rewarded for their participation in my study. Small payments and rewards are often budgeted for and deployed as a practical means of recruiting and maintaining the participation of diarists (e.g., Kuntsche and Robert’s, 2009, work with young adults), yet some argue that such payments reinforce unequal power relationships (e.g., Ansell, 2001). Clearly, researcher beliefs and research context as well as resource availability will affect the way this issue is managed. Yet in keeping with the majority of published language teaching and learning studies, and taking account of the relatively “resource-light” approach of my project, my diarists were not in fact rewarded for their participation. Given the steps I had taken to develop with the participants a clear understanding of the project and its requirements, and the positive relationships with the diarists that I worked to develop, I hoped that the act of keeping a diary and contributing to research would be rewarding enough in and of itself to encourage and maintain effective participation over time. Fortunately, these hopes were justified and all 13 participants continued to participate throughout the course of the research.

      Interpreting the Diary Data: Dilemmas and Decisions

       Decisions About Data Analysis

      As the discussion throughout the chapter has shown, the ways in which I conceptualized the data collection process, my decisions underpinning diary design, and the ways in which I communicated with and related to the research participants shaped the resultant data; as Richards et al. (2012, p. 33) note about ethnographic research in general, I was “the primary research instrument” in my project.

      My analysis needed to make sense of participants’ “lifeworlds” in order to represent their subjective, insider representations of their classroom and in-class events (see also, Blommaert & Jie, 2010). Consequently, my analysis was necessarily interpretive, as I sought to both “believe” and “doubt” what the data was telling me (Bailey, 1991). This involved identifying the participants’ “truths” through themes and categorizations,which emerged from the data itself, while at the same time acknowledging any difficulties around the diarists’ recruitment and participation, and, consequently, the data they provided – for example, was the study subject to recruitment bias? Did the participants vary in their attitudes to self-disclosure, and did individual diarists’ data differ in length and detail, giving some participants more “voice” in the study than others; if so, how should this data be treated? (Bolger et al., 2003).

      Consequently, my analysis needed go beyond the “list-making” activity of solely categorizing data to identify a conceptual framework, which recurrent themes within the data would illuminate (Pavlenko, 2007). In the study, therefore, my framework for interpreting the data was my conceptualization of the classroom as a socially constructed environment (see “Introduction”). Subsequently, although there were a range of ways in which I could approach and analyze the data (ranging from, for example, content analysis to conversational or narrative analysis), I did not start the analysis with a series of pre-determined themes and categorizations in mind that I then attempted to identify. Rather, I pursued a data-led Grounded Theory approach in which patterns and categorizations within the data emerged during the analysis. Such emergent themes included, for example, learners’ deliberate underperformance and the role of silence during class (i.e., some learners were reluctant to answer the teacher’s questions during all-class plenary sessions even though they knew the answers, because they were embarrassed at speaking in public or did not want to be labeled a “know-it-all” by others); apparent inconsistencies in the teacher’s treatment of some learners’ enquiries (i.e., some learners’ difficulties were dealt with in more detail and at much greater length than others, dependent on, as the teacher saw it, the level of detail a particular learner required balanced against the needs, interest, and in-class motivation/boredom of other students); and the ways in which potentially problematic “moments” of interaction were smoothed over by all participants (i.e., all participants seemed to appreciate the need for a balance between developing their full understanding in a language classroom at moments of communicative difficulty and breakdown and the need for lessons to at some point “move on,” even when some had not fully grasped the language being presented, discussed, or practiced). In each case, therefore, the data revealed regular patterns of behavior in lessons that, while clearly affecting language learning opportunities, had its origins in the participants’ understanding of the classroom as a social environment underpinned by shared social norms.

       The Diarists and the Data

      As with any diary-based research, the participants in my study inevitably responded to the process of maintaining their diary in differing ways, with implications for the subsequent analysis of data. As noted in the previous section, I needed to be aware of recruitment bias during participant selection, taking account of, for example, the ways in which the diarists’ age, gender, class, and cultural background might affect their engagement with the research and with diary-writing. The cohort of learners were relatively homogeneous in terms of age

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