Data Collection Procedures

3.6.1 Ethics

First, it is noteworthy that after designing and revising the data collection methods, the research requirements were fulfilled and ethical approval obtained from the research ethics committee at Cardiff University prior to the commencement of field research. Despite there being no risk of harming the subjects in this study, it still involves human sensitivities, as the participants were asked to fill in face-threatening questionnaires and engage in face- threatening role-play tasks. Thus, ethical approval was sought to ensure the personal freedom and absolute safety of the participants would be guaranteed. Additionally, since the ethical dimension of the research extends beyond filling in a form and obtaining permission from schools, I assessed the ethical implications of DCTs and RPTs, evaluating the content of the

questions, and ensuring the participants’ freedom of choice, anonymity and confidentiality. I asked the participants to carefully read the consent form before agreeing to participate, and made it clear that they were free to withdraw from the study at any time without needing to provide reasons for doing so (see appendix 1).

3.6.2 Pilot Study

After obtaining ethical approval, a pilot study was conducted in August 2015 with twenty ESL Saudi learners from Cardiff University and nine British NSE. All potential participants found to meet the conditions of participation and willing to participate were asked to read and sign a consent form, and were encouraged to ask questions to clarify concerns at any time. At this stage in the data collection process, several issues were identified. First, the pilot study revealed several of the scenarios and categories were not transparent to respondents. In addition, it emerged that the questionnaire took longer to complete than anticipated, which risks causing respondent exhaustion and loss of interest, potentially then yielding poor quality data. Moreover, a number of Saudi ESL participants perceived the DCTs and the RPTs as a language-proficiency test, and consequently reacted and responded accordingly. A further aspect that attracted my attention during the pilot study, was that certain participants did not identify with their roles in the RPT scenarios, which caused difficulties for some participants when ranking the level of imposition described on their role- play cards. It was also observed that the first page of the questionnaire (the personal information) needed to be reworked to encourage participants to complete the questionnaires. Finally, the pilot study also revealed that due to Saudi traditions and customs, recruiting female participants would be a challenging endeavour.

3.6.3 Main Study

Prior to conducting the main study, a number of changes and additions were made to both data collection instruments. First, extra instructions and detailed information were added,

where necessary, to make the scenarios more plausible and accessible. In addition, a line was added to the cards after setting out each role-play scenario to further clarify the task requirements. In addition, several scenarios from both instruments were re-designed and simplified to reduce completion time and manage the participants’ mental effort. With regard to the difficulty recruiting female participants for the study, additional time was allocated on my PhD timetable to ensure more Saudi female participants could be recruited. The majority of the data was collected between November 2015 and March 2016 at two locations: Taif University in Saudi Arabia (for the EFL group) and in Cardiff (for the ESL and NSE groups). For the main study, each participant was asked about DCTs and RPTs, and all stated that they could follow the scenario descriptions readily, that the conversational prompts could be easily responded to, and the questions were well defined and clearly understood.

3.6.4 Factors Considered in the Analysis

It is important here to mention several issues that were considered during the data coding and analysis not discussed above. Firstly, the research design for this study considers several factors that might affect the non-native groups’ production of speech acts, in addition to the degree of impositions and the social status of interlocutors. More specifically, it examined the role played by length of time spent learning EFL and ESL, and the intensity of the communication between the ESL participants and native speakers. Therefore, both the EFL and ESL groups were subdivided into two subgroups in accordance with the personal information they provided: (1) those who had spent less than two years learning English, and (2) those who have learned English for between two to four years. In this research, the notion of length of time spent learning relates to participants’ enrolment in EFL or ESL programmes. The ESL group was divided into two additional subgroups, according to the extent of their communication with native speakers: (1) those communicating with native speakers for fewer than five hours a week, and (2) those communicating with native speakers for five hours a

week or more. The influence of the intensity of communication with native speakers has been infrequently discussed in previous empirical research on speech acts, but is likely to influence pragmatic use. Finally, it is important to conclude this section by mentioning that since this study focuses on the frequencies of specific pragmatic features by different speaking groups, I used the SPSS to perform the statistical data analysis, and the Chi Square (χ2) Test was applied to the data to measure the statistical significance of differences in the usages of the pragmatic features by the groups, as will be discussed in detail in the results chapters

To conclude this chapter, the approach followed in this research in terms of participants, data collection and analysis, the data collection instruments and the coding taxonomies employed here were provided in detail in this chapter to ensure valid findings and interpretations were generated from the data. Following this methodology chapter, chapter four presents the findings obtained in this research regarding the analysis of the speech act of requests.