Designing the survey

There are many studies that have dealt with teachers’ choices and beliefs about reading, but most of them tend to employ solely qualitative methods, investigate pre-service teachers rather than in-service teachers, and primary rather than secondary teachers, or examine literacy rather than literature (see e.g. the overview presented by Maggioni et al., 2015). Although there are quantitative studies that have sought to examine teachers’ choices, beliefs and/or practices regarding literature teaching (e.g. Quirk et al., 2010; Witte & Jansen, 2015), these have concerned themselves with other approaches than the one pursued in this study. I, therefore, needed to develop a new questionnaire rather than adopt previously used templates. After consulting several handbooks on empirical research in education in general and survey development in particular (Cohen et al., 2011; C. F. Conrad & Serlin, 2011; Green, Camilli, Elmore, Skukauskaitė, & Grace, 2006; Johnson & Christensen, 2012; McMillan & Schumacher, 2010; Tashakkori & Teddlie, 2010) as well as an earlier study conducted in the Norwegian context (Ibsen & Hellekjær, 2003), a preliminary questionnaire was created that addressed the issues I wanted to explore.

The questionnaire was then piloted in two stages. First, as recommended by Berends (2006), I conducted what he refers to as a cognitive interview (pp. 632-634) with a teacher who had recent experience from teaching English in upper secondary school. This interview entailed that the teacher filled out the questionnaire while talking about how s/he perceived the questions, and s/he was asked questions regarding specific items where I was unsure of whether the wording communicated my intention. This pilot was helpful because it allowed me to gain access to how this teacher thought when encountering the questions I had formulated. It is important to note that this was just one teacher’s perception – had I talked to several I would almost certainly have had other responses – but it nevertheless made me reformulate several items, as well as change the order of some of the sections.44 After revising the survey on the basis of this

44 _{One major change that happened as a result of this interview was that the section containing open questions}

was moved earlier. In the first version of the questionnaire, that section was placed at the very end of the survey, but the teacher argued that respondents would perhaps not answer in detail because they were tired of responding

interview, the second stage of piloting was undertaken when the survey was sent out to English teachers in three upper secondary schools. The teachers were specifically asked to comment on any items that they found unclear or difficult to understand. These comments were taken into account in the second revision, and some items were removed while others were altered.45 _{Since both piloting stages were qualitative and}

the questionnaire was not directly linked to a hypothesis, the final questionnaire should be viewed as exploratory.

The final version of the survey contains a total of 54 items divided into four sections.46

Section 1 contains 14 background questions that all respondents had to answer, and these were either dichotomous or multiple choice questions where only one answer was possible, or multiple choice questions where several answers were possible. Section 2 contains three open questions in which teachers provide examples of specific literary texts and textbooks. Section 3 contains 20 questions about teachers’ practices and section 4 contains 17 questions about teachers’ views on literature and literature teaching in general. Lastly, teachers had the possibility to comment on the survey. The survey focuses on nine topics:

 Teacher-oriented approach to choosing and teaching literature  Student-oriented approach to choosing and teaching literature  Textbook-reliant approach to choosing and teaching literature  Employment of texts of varying lengths

 Employment of different literary genres

 Teachers’ perceived freedom when choosing literature  Literary texts and morality

to questions. As these items formed a vital part of the survey, I decided to move the section earlier; it instead became section 2 (see description of survey sections in the next paragraph).

45 _{Most significantly, I removed two open questions in section 2 that asked teachers to give examples of high-}

quality and low-quality literary texts. The reason was that the teachers thought answering four open questions asking for examples of texts was too time-consuming and tiring. Therefore, I decided to prioritize the two open questions that asked teachers to provide examples of suitable and unsuitable literary texts for classroom use. Other changes included removing examples of authors from item 25, as the teachers argued that this could make respondents only answer affirmatively if they had used texts written by these authors, and refining item 53 by including the phrase “the variation that exists”.

 Definitions of literary quality

 The importance of literature in subject English

These topics were based on research findings and other works regarding reading, text selection, and literature teaching in subject English (A. S. Bakken, 2018; Birketveit & Williams, 2013; Brevik, 2015; Eikrem, 2006; T. M. Gilje, 2014; Ø. Gilje et al., 2016; Ibsen & Hellekjær, 2003; Ibsen & Wiland, 2000) and in subject Norwegian (Kjelen, 2013; Kulbrandstad et al., 2005; Penne, 2012), as well as analyses of the current and previous English subject curricula in Norway (KKUF, 1993b; 2001; KUD, 1976a; 1976b; 1985; 1991; 1992; Udir, 2006a; 2013a).

In a survey that depends on the collaboration of teachers of English in Norway, choice of language had to be considered. I chose to ask questions in Norwegian since most English teachers in Norway are native speakers of Norwegian. There are also quite a few foreign English teachers, but they have to be able to understand and use Norwegian in order to work in schools. A possibility could have been to offer the survey in both languages, but I feared that might compromise construct validity; even though English and Norwegian share many transparent words and grammatical structures, there are concepts that are explained differently in the two languages. One example is the Norwegian concept “læreverk” which does not have an exact counterpart in English: neither “teaching materials” nor “textbook” corresponds to the Norwegian term. For these reasons, I chose to only offer the survey in one language, and Norwegian was chosen since it is the native language of the majority of the respondents.

Another issue to consider was the format of the survey. I decided to create an electronic questionnaire since the potential respondents were teachers, which meant that they would have access to the internet and be able to read and understand the questions (Jacobsen, 2015, p. 281). I used Questback, first and foremost because this was the platform recommended by the university.47 There are some disadvantages to distributing questionnaires electronically, the most important relating to the low response rate. The reasons for this include that electronic questionnaires distributed via

e-mail can disappear among all the other e-mails respondents receive in a day and that people are more likely to postpone responding to electronic questionnaires, sometimes for so long that it is no longer possible to participate (Jacobsen, 2015, pp. 280-281). I decided to use an electronic survey because in my view, the advantages outweighed the disadvantages, and four issues were of particular importance (Jacobsen, 2015, pp. 278-280). Firstly, the survey is easily distributed. In this case, I included the link to the survey in the e-mails I sent out to teachers and the county networks,48 and the teachers could access the survey directly from there. Secondly, an electronic survey simplifies data collection. When the survey was closed, I received files containing all the respondents’ answers, and these were easily – and correctly – transferred to SPSS (Version 25; IBM 2017), which was the computer program for statistical analysis that I used. Thirdly, this type of survey gives the respondents flexibility: the teachers could respond wherever and whenever they liked, as long as they had a functioning internet connection. Fourthly, electronic surveys increase respondents’ sense of anonymity (Jacobsen, 2015, p. 279), which I hoped would help increase the response rate.