Data Collection

3.3.4.1 Ethics Consideration

Before being involved in the study, the researcher first asked the permission of the high- ranking officials of Rajamangala University of Technology Isan, Thailand. Although the researcher is an in-service lecturer of Rajamangala University of Technology Isan, it was important for the researcher to make sure the researcher is not taking advantage of her available access to students at Rajamangala University of Technology Isan,

Thailand. A letter of introduction and inviting participation to the study was sent to the president of the Rajamangala University of Technology Isan and the university board requesting for approval. After obtained the approval, the researcher began conducting the study.

Questionnaire and interview Interlanguage data were collected at Rajamangala University of Technology Isan, Thailand in the second semester of 2008. Two

instruments were used for data collection: (1) a Discourse Completion Task (DCT) and (2) interview questions. This research has been approved by the Social Science Human Research Ethics Committee of the University of Tasmania. As this research involved human subjects, ethical issues were taken into account in collecting data. In this section the primary methods of data collection selected for the present study, a questionnaire in the form of DCT and an interview, are discussed with ethics consideration.

3.3.4.2 Approach to Questionnaire

The study used a questionnaire in the form of Discourse Completion Task (DCT) by modifying those situations used in previous apology speech studies: Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1986); Olshtain and Cohen, (1983); Bergman and Kasper, (1993).

In each campus students were invited to participate in the study in person by the researcher. Students were provided with a survey packet comprised of an Information sheet, a Consent form (see Appendix A) and the Discourse Completion Task (DCT). As the researcher was aware of the ethics behind the research activity, students were clearly informed about aims of the study, its procedure, the process involved in the

dissemination of the findings, confidentiality, and security of information. The questionnaires were anonymous. The researcher assured the students that all data collected would be coded to protect their identity and privacy. They were free to participate in the study and they could withdraw at anytime according to their wishes. Students who agreed to participate in the study were asked to complete the Consent form. After obtaining consent, the participants were asked to complete the DCT, taking approximately 30 minutes. Due to the study focus on language use and pragmatic strategies not the language ability, each situation was explained in Thai to the

participants by a researcher who is a native Thai before they completed a questionnaire. In order to avoid putting pressure while students were completing a questionnaire, the researcher left the room and returned back to collect the questionnaires in a response box when the 30 minutes ended. Responses were returned in a response box in front of the classroom.

3.3.4.3 Approach to Interview

Participants were invited to participate in an interview by the researcher. Interview Information Sheet and Consent Form (see Appendix B) were provided to students. Students who agreed to participate in an interview were asked to complete a Consent Form. After obtaining consent, at a mutually agreed upon time, the interviews were conducted individually in the office of the teacher or in university classrooms. Each interview was for an approximate duration of thirty minutes. The interview was tape- recorded to ensure accurate responses were captured. They were asked for permission to tape the interviews. In the first part of the interview, participants were asked about background information, such as major, year of study and level of English proficiency from their own views. There was no name record to make sure that the researcher keeps the findings anonymous. In the second part, they were asked to answer open-ended questions. At this point, the researcher was aware that the researcher’s personal opinions were not got in the way of the research. It was important to avoid sensitive words such as good or bad of being polite for apologizing or impolite for not

apologizing others when do something wrong and avoid raising difficult question during interview to cause the participants emotional harm. Thai language was used during the interviews when participants were asked to explain their answers. The recordings were transcribed by the researcher and sent to interviewees to review their transcripts.

3.4 Data Analysis

As mentioned in the methodological issues, a combination of methods was employed to overcome the limitation of each methodology used in the study. Thus, questionnaires

were used as the combination of data collection method with the interviews. In order to investigate the interlanguage data, two types of analysis were carried out on the data collection; one was quantitative analysis, which was used to gather production data from DCT. The other was qualitative analysis which was used to get in-depth perception data from interviews.

3.4.1 Quantitative Analysis

A quantitative analysis in this study was the analysis of strategies speakers use when apologizing. In contrast to most of the previous research studies that focused on speech act production, the present analysis is an attempt at not only finding the frequency of different types of apologies in English of EFL learners, but also at the different ways these types combine when apologizing in situations with various sociolinguistic factors. Apologies can be performed by any one of the strategies below, or any combination or sequence thereof (Blum-Kulka, House, & Kasper, 1989: 289). Consequently, apology strategies gathered by this study were analyzed based on four super-strategies with eight sub-strategies provided by Holmes (1990) which has been used as coding categories in previous research studies on English and Thai apology strategies. The apology

Table 3. 3 Holmes’s (1990) Apology Strategies Classification

Apology Strategies Examples

A. An Explicit expression of apology A1 An offer of apology/ IFID A2 An expression of regret A3 A request for forgiveness

I apologize; please accept my apologies. I’m sorry; I’m afraid.

Excuse me; forgive me.

B. An explanation or account The traffic was horrendous. C. An acknowledgement of responsibility

C1 Accepting the blame C2 Express self-deficiency

C3 Recognize H as entitled to an apology C4 Express lack of intent

C5 Offer repair/ redress

It is my fault; Silly me. I was confused; I forgot. You’re right.

I didn’t mean to break it. I’ll get a new one for you. D. A promise of forbearance I promise it won’t happen again.

Apart from four the main categories above, intensification and alerter were also considered for the analysis.

Intensification. The illocutionary force of the apology can be intensified by using adverbials. Adverbial intensifiers are such as ‘really’ as in ‘I’m really sorry’ and ‘so’ as in “I’m so sorry.” Intensification usually takes an intensifying expression within the IFID.

Alerter. An alerter is an element whose function it is to alert the hearer’s attention to ensuring the speech act. Alerter, for example, title/role (professor), pronoun (you) and attention getter (hey, excuse me).

Table 3. 4 Coding Categories of the Present Study

Code number Coding categories Possible Realizations Code number 1

A. Explicit expression of apology

A1 An offer of apology/ IFID I apologize; please accept my apologies.

Code number 2 A2 An expression of regret I’m sorry; I’m afraid. Code number 3 A3 A request for forgiveness Excuse me; forgive me. Code number 4 B. Explanation or account The traffic was horrendous.

Code number 5

C. Acknowledgement of responsibility

C1 Accepting the blame It is my fault; silly me. Code number 6 C2 Expressing self-deficiency I was confused; I forgot. Code number 7 C3 Recognizing H as

deserving apology

You’re right.

Code number 8 C4 Expressing lack of intent I didn’t mean to break it. Code number 9 C5 Offering repair/ redress I’ll get a new one for you. Code number 10 D. Promise of forbearance I promise it won’t happen

again.

Code number 11 E. Alerter Professor; teacher

Code number 12 F. Intensifiers of the apology I’m very sorry; I’m really sorry about that.

The quantitative analysis was done with the SPSS software, the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences. Each of the above categories was assigned a number from 1 to 12 since SPSS only allows abbreviations for creating a data file.

Compound apologies found in this study were categorized into seven groups in order to more easily compare compound apology strategies. In the following Table 3.5, each of the compound apologies shows a variety of strategies. The SPSS program was used to investigate frequencies and percentage of apology strategies. Each of the strategy groups was assigned a number from 1 to 7 to facilitate the analysis process.

Table 3. 5 Compound Apology Strategies

1. A+ A, AA, AAC

2. AB+ AB, ABA, ABC, ABD, ABCD

3. AC+ AC, ACA, ACB, ACC, ACD, ACBC, ACCB, ACCAD 4. AD+ AD

5. B+ B, BA, BC, BD

6. C+ C, CA, CAB, CAC, CB, CBA, CC, CCA 7. D+ D, DA, DC

A=Explicit expression of apology, B= Explanation or account, C= Acknowledgement of responsibility, D= Promise of forbearance

This procedure allowed for the possibility to run both frequencies of each category whether it appeared as a standalone or in a combination with other categories. The grammatical acceptability or accuracy of expressions was not examined in the present study due to the fact that the study focuses on language use and pragmatic strategies, not language ability.

The term ‘category’ or ‘main category’ is used in this study to refer to the categories classified by Holmes (1990). The term ‘coding categories’ refers to the coding

categories presented above which were used to code interlanguage data. Also, the term ‘strategy’ or ‘apology strategy’ is used to refer to the choice the respondents made in order to apologize. The apology strategy can consist of a single (stand alone) category or of a combination of several categories. Here is an example of an apology strategy that consists of a single category, namely ‘promise of forbearance or D strategy’ as in “It will never happen again.” was coded as D. And here is an example of a combination of the categories A3 Strategy ‘a request for forgiveness’ and D Strategy ‘promise of forbearance’ as in “Please forgive me, it will never happen again.” was coded as AD. These compound apologies were coded as number 4 in AD+ group.

3.4.2 Qualitative Analysis

The second type of the analysis is qualitative analysis which allowed for a more in depth look at different strategies that Thai learners of English use in order to apologize in situations with different sociolinguistics variation and also provided learners’ opinions about the significance of apology and apology teaching in language learning. In this study, the qualitative data consisted of text documents obtained from interviews which had been recorded on audiotape and transcribed. These text documents were coded and analyzed.

3.5 Summary

So far, in this chapter, the contrastive pragmatics in apology; methodological issues in the study of speech acts; population, samples and participants; research instruments; ethics consideration, data collection and data analysis have been discussed. Rather than relying on one single method, combinations of methods were used: contrastive method for analysis of previous studies on apology speech act; Questionnaire method in the form of Discourse Completion Task and interview method for collecting interlanguage data. As the study of speech act is complex and needs much care in designing data collection, a combined method for data collection is the best way to overcome the limitation of methodology.

The next three chapters will describe the analysis of previous studies on apology speech acts. Apology strategies in Thai language will be described in Chapter 4. Apology

strategies in English language will be described in Chapter 5. Contrastive pragmatics of Thai and English apologies will be described in Chapter 6.