Data collection and analysis

The following techniques were used to gather information:

(a) Observations of trainees: I used informal and unstructured observations of the group following a range of foci as listed below:

105 Table 6 Observation foci in case study one

Workshops Observation Foci

One Identification of individual needs and group dynamics Two Personal views on teaching and learning modern languages Three Participation and engagement in language tasks – Talk-partners

Four Participation and engagement in language tasks – Think-aloud protocols Five Participation and engagement in language tasks – Learning outcomes Six Views on language learning: has anything changed?

The information was recorded in the form of field notes and three questions were used to analyse the information gathered:

(a) What was the initial scenario?

(b) How engaged were the trainees during tasks? What was the evidence?

(c) What were the learning outcomes? What changed in relation to the initial scenario? What prompted the change?

(b) Focus groups: volunteers were invited to attend two focus groups, one after workshop two and the other after workshop six. The first one was made up of twelve participants and the second consisted of sixteen trainees. In both instances, the participants were randomly chosen. The topics for discussion in both groups were based on the information gathered from observation reports and journal entries. In the first group the questions asked were: 1. Learning languages increases children’s future prospects. Please discuss.

2. Learning to speak another language is difficult and time consuming. Please discuss. 3. A language specialist teacher has to teach modern languages in the primary school.

Please discuss.

4. A generalist primary school teacher can teach languages. Please explain.

In the second focus group questions two, three and four were repeated and a fourth one was introduced: ‘I feel I can teach the basics of another language. Please explain’.

The discussion in both groups lasted forty five minutes and the views provided by the trainees were summarised and recorded on flip-chart sheets which the trainees were asked to go through to check accuracy. The comments were summarised into statements which I grouped into the categories of positive, negative and neutral in relation to the trainees’ perception of L2 learning. In the case of negative views, I sub-divided them according to those relating to (a) attitudes, (b) ability and (c) self-esteem resulting from a previous thematic analysis on the views discussed. Those views containing a settled way of thinking or feeling were grouped under the attitude sub-category, for example ‘Learning German

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requires a lot of concentration and it is hard to pronounce’; ability referred to those

comments indicating the possession of skills or proficiency or lack of them, for example ‘I

can hardly speak English let alone another language’ and finally self-esteem was linked to

the views referring to beliefs and confidence (or lack of it) in one’s own ability and worth, for example ‘I am not good at languages’.

(c) Voice recording: discussions in talk-partners using think-aloud protocols, as explained in 3.8.4 on page 89, were recorded using mobile phones which I then collected via a Bluetooth device. Recordings were undertaken in workshops two, three, four, five and six and in total sixty eight recordings ranging from two to twenty minutes long were collected. For the purpose of analysis, I focused on instances where the use of the initiation-response- feedback (I-R-F) sequence was clear. As the number of recordings was still significant, I randomly selected five recordings and transcribed the interactions which I then analysed following the categories of (a) negotiation, (b) identification of strategies and (c) use of strategies for problem-solving which resulted from a prior thematic analysis.

(d) Reflective journals: keeping a webfolio consisting of a series of folders, one of which was a reflective journal, was a course requirement. The trainees were asked to reflect on a particular incident taking place during workshop one and refer back to it after workshop six. The intention was that they could explore how the learning experience gained during the series of workshops helped them change their perceptions whilst encouraging them to identify and use new teaching and learning skills. The trainees had been previously introduced to writing reflectively and they were familiar with the structured debriefing model (Gibbs, 1998), which consisted of four stages: description of an incident, feelings, analysis/synthesis and conclusions. For the purpose of analysis, I discarded narrative accounts, consisting mainly of anecdotal reports, and only used reflective prose where the structured debriefing model was employed applying a qualitative word count analysis to identify trends by focusing on key concepts or common themes.

(e) Questionnaire (Foreign Language Class Anxiety Survey –FLACS): As discussed in section 3.8.1, page 84, I used this tool to explore how self-esteem and ability affected trainees’ L2 learning. The questionnaire was administered in workshop one. The questionnaire (see Appendix VI) was completed before the trainees had left the session. The data collected were analysed according to Noormohamadi’s (2009) model in the following manner:

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1. To determine validity of FLACS, item analysis was applied, calculating the correlation coefficient of each item with the whole battery.

2. Statistical check for reliability of FLACS, using Cronbach alpha to estimate reliability coefficient in continuous data was applied.

3. Pearson product-moment correlation was used to determine correlation between

foreign language anxiety and variables such as the type of language learning strategies used by the participants.

A median split procedure was calculated on the basis of the total scores obtained on the FLACS, which was of 0.94. According to Noormohamadi (2009), learners scoring 0.94 and above are considered a high-anxiety group whilst those with lower scores belong to a low- anxiety group (see section 4.4.2).

(f) Language Audit: this was a self-assessment tool based on the level d escriptors of the Common European Reference Framework for Languages (COE, 2001). A

description of this instrument was provided in section 3.8.2 on page 85. The audit assessed listening, reading, spoken interaction, spoken production, strategies and writing (see Appendix II) to ascertain the level that the trainees had reached at the end of workshop six having started in workshop one as beginners.

4 .4 Analysis of trainees’ views before the intervention 4.4.1 Journals

The categories of attitudes, ability and self-esteem, which had been identified in focus group one, were used to analyse journal entries. A word count inquiry technique was used when classifying the entries and the analysis was based on a logarithmic pattern calculated by software (www.wordlet.com). The results are shown in Figure 9 in a word cloud where the size of the word is proportionate to the number of times a word had been used in the journal entries.

108 Figure 9 Word cloud based on trainees' journal entries

The categories that were referred to the most were those related to negative perceptions of self- esteem indicated by concepts such as shy, scared, self-conscious, fear, shyness, followed by terms denoting a lack of ability, such as unable, hard, pronunciation, mistakes, speaking. However, the use of concepts related to the attitudes category was significantly lower than those used for self-esteem and ability. This result indicated that low self-esteem together with a negative perception of themselves as language learners seemed to be associated with anxiety and stress. These reasons were further explored by administering the FLACS questionnaire.

4.4.2 Questionnaire (Foreign Language Anxiety Class Scale)

Analysis of the FLACS questionnaire responses indicated that fifty three per cent of the trainees (n=sixteen) scored slightly above the median (0.94) and were rated as high anxiety, whereas the results for the rest of the trainees (n=fourteen) showed scores below the median and, consequently, were rated as low anxiety.

The questions that all the trainees in the high anxiety group answered in the categories of

109 Category Questions Strongly agree 1, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 20, 23, 24, 26, 30, 31, 33 Strongly disagree 8, 9, 10,

These items in the strongly agree or strongly disagree categories were associated with situations promoting feelings of insecurity, nervousness and embarrassment. The answers given indicated that the trainees felt upset when making mistakes and when being corrected publicly. This made them apprehensive, tense and self-conscious of their own performance because of fears of being ridiculed or failing. Also they acknowledged that they felt overwhelmed by the number of rules they had to memorise when learning an L2. The trainees strongly disagreed with feeling at ease in a language lesson, but indicated that they would not be nervous if they had to speak the target language with native speakers.

The responses provided to the above questions showed that there were three areas producing anxiety, as follows: communication apprehension, test anxiety and fears of negative evaluation. The trainees in the high anxiety group were worried about being less competent than other peers, they felt uneasy about examinations and embarrassed about using the target language in public because of fears of making mistakes. They also anticipated that they would be evaluated negatively by their peers, which reinforced their perceived language limitations and increasing their worries. Nonetheless, the difference between the high anxiety group and the low anxiety one was not significant (<7%). Oxford (1990) argues that only when the difference between the two groups is more pronounced (+26%) then anxiety is more likely to affect the whole teaching group negatively; however, the author (ibid) claims that such occurrences are rare and have not been sufficiently documented.

Research undertaken by Noormohamadi (2009) showed that the levels of anxiety identified in the participants of his study were not significant and did not influence learning outcomes. Noormohamadi (ibid) concludes that the perception of anxiety falls under the category of learners’ beliefs, which he defines as ‘a learning tension which is not different from any other tension identified when learning other academic disciplines’ (2009, p. 432), a conclusion which is shared by other research, such as MacIntyre & Gardner (1989), Aida (1994), Saito & Samimy (1996), Na (2007), Liu & Jackson (2008), Kao & Craigie (2010), Wang (2010) and Latif et al. (2011).

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Findings by Allwright & Bailey (1991), Chaudron (1998) and Tsou (2005) identified a combination of different emotional aspects when highly literate adults start to learn another language showing in feelings of discomfort often arising as they experience a lack of oral comprehension, and in particular when the consequences matter, for example passing an exam. These emotional aspects that trigger a negative emotional response have been identified by Shane (2010) as educational background, fear of being unable to understand, loss of face, expectations of the instructor and the availability of comprehensible input; however the research mentioned above showed that these aspects do not seem to hinder language learning. This is in line with the results obtained in the current case study where anxiety occurred before the instruction had started and dissipated as learning progressed.

Following these results, I put an intervention into practice to challenge the trainees’ negative pre-conceived ideas and to support them in the acquisition of L2 knowledge for teaching.