Dialogic reflection (DR)

DRs were conducted to explore teachers’ beliefs and the practices through DR. Even though data of DR were not used as a means to triangulate the data, it was essential to explain what DRs were like and what took place in DRs.

In this study, DRs (see definitions of DR in section 2.6) aimed to encourage participants to discuss their teaching practice in the form of a group with the purposes of reflecting on what they taught, how they taught, and why they taught that way and sharing teaching experiences. It was also used to investigate the teachers’ reasons behind practices which allowed me to better understand their teaching instructional behaviors. Another value of DRs was to explore if there were any influences of DRs on changes in teachers’ beliefs and practices.

DR sessions were conducted following some characteristics of a focus group, as a method to collect data from multiple participants at the same time (Braun and Clarke, 2013). It was a challenge to encourage participants to talks as well as controlling the discussion so that it did not go off topic. The discussion items were taken from classroom observation notes or the actions that took place in classes. These were prepared before the meetings to ensure that the

Teachers Numbers of lessons observed in data collection period

Reasons why no class

T1 7 lessons of two-hour session 7 lesson of one-hour session

Finished course early T2 5 lessons of two-hour session

5 lesson of one-hour session

Sickness/ physical checkup T3 8 lessons of two-hour session

8 lesson of one-hour session T4 8 lessons of two-hour session

8 lesson of one-hour session T5 7 lessons of two-hour session

7 lesson of one-hour session

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subjects to be probed in the session were covered, making sessions run smoothly (Matthews and Ross, 2014) and eliciting responses concerning the research topic (Bryman, 2012).

After the contribution by all the participants, I acted as facilitator, monitoring the talk by listening, providing questions from classroom observation notes to the teachers and probing questions arising at DRs. The main reason why I asked the questions during DR sessions was to ensure that the information needed was successfully collected. Questions were raised one by one and skill by skill starting from vocabulary and going on to reading, grammar and writing. All the skills taught in the course were included in the discussion. Even though the main focus of the research was on vocabulary, the course emphasised reading and writing skills. Besides this, based on my observation, all teachers were obviously concerned and eager to discuss reading and writing. Through my careful decision, it did not seem right to have them discuss only vocabulary and ignore other skills they were interested in. The teachers were invited one by one to share their teaching experience by reflecting on what they taught, how they taught and why they did so, and they were invited to share their opinions on the other participants’ teachings. They normally took turns to give their responses based on what I asked (see sample questions in Table 3.4). Furthermore, they were encouraged to ask questions and share their opinions or comments on their peers’ teaching. Even though they used the same book and followed the same syllabus, their lessons were not the same each week because some teachers had a more rapid pace in instruction than others.

Table 3.4 presents types of questions the teachers were asked at DR sessions. These questions were categorised following Kvale (1996) guidance of qualitative interview and oriented to encourage teachers’ reflection on what and how they taught, and why they did it that way and how to improve.

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Table 3.4 Types of questions in DRs

During DR sessions, questions varied from week to week and across the weeks depending on how teachers reported or how practices were observed. Generally, most questions about the same vocabulary teaching techniques in the following weeks were not repeated unless some of their practices remained the same after a few weeks of observation.

Two instruments deployed during the sessions were audio recordings and photographs of how they taught which were taken during the observation. Permission for audio recordings and photographs of how they taught was requested at the first session. The photos of how teachers taught and the students’ participation were shown whilst they were sharing their information. The photographs of their teaching greatly helped the teachers gain some understanding of what was going on in the classrooms. The photographs of students’ participation were sometimes shown to provide evidence of classroom atmosphere and students’ reaction towards activities, in order to confirm whether their practice was good. Video clips of classroom observations were not employed in order to save time. Finally, I thanked them again for their time and their permission which was granted to use the data in this study.

Venue and time of DR sessions were decided based on the teachers’ convenience. A meeting room was chosen because it was quiet, comfortable and convenient for the participants to

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access. Further, the room was airy and refreshments were prepared for all the participants to create a relaxed and friendly atmosphere (Matthews and Ross, 2014). The session was held only once a week to avoid disturbing the teachers too much. The timescale for a particular session lasted approximately 45 minutes depending on how many issues had to be discussed and how much contribution the teacher participants could make. However, it never lasted longer than an hour.

After each DR session, transcripts of the recordings and notes from the group were made by the end of the day, after each session, to avoid forgetting some of the key elements that emerged during the discussion.

There were some limitations of DRs. Firstly, the data was specifically derived from a small number of participants in a particular context. Therefore, the findings obtained from this study might not be rigorous enough and might not be able to provide a generalised conclusion. However, following Denzin (1983), generalisation should not be the objective of all research projects. Secondly, my presence as a researcher created some unwanted effects during classroom observation (Denscombe, 2014). This is inevitable and beyond what I could control; nonetheless, evidence of classroom observation should minimise the effects. Thirdly, as I was a facilitator, there may be bias on my comments, or in the questions provided in DRs and the interpretations; however, to increase reliability and validity, inter-rater and back-translation were employed. It was also noted that even though my comments on their teaching techniques might be shared in the risk-free contexts of DRs, it depended on teachers whether they would agree or disagree.