Instrument-interviewes

Interviews have been used widely as a method of data collection in recent linguistic research studies (e.g. Dornyei & Skehan, 2003; Nazari, 2007) showed that interviews are the primary method of investigating linguistic phenomena. They are more powerful than

questionnares in producing narrative data that allows researchers to investigate people's views in greater depth (Kvale, 1996). Cohen et al (2007) asserts that interviewing is a valuable method for exploring the construction and negotiation of meanings in a natural setting. Interviewing requires a respect for and curiosity about what people say, and a systematic effort to really hear and understand what people tell you, seeking to explore and describe the quality and nature of how people behave, experience and understand (Rubin & Rubin, 2005). In addition, Brown (2005) notes that the qualitative research’s potential for forming

hypotheses is one of its great strengths. Kvale also explains the qualitative research interview as a construction site of knowledge. It should be noted that the shorter the interviewer’s questions and the longer the subject’s answers, the better an interview is (Barbour & Schostak, 2005). Although interviewing is a powerful tool for getting insights into interviewee's perceptions, it can go hand in hand with other methods, providing in-depth information about participants' values and beliefs (Ho, 2006). Using more than one data collection instrument would help obtaining richer data and validating the research findings.

Aiming to investigate participants’ identities, experiences, beliefs, and orientations toward a range of phenomena, interviews have been used for decades in empirical inquiry across the social sciences as one or the primary means of generating data (Talmy, 2010). They were used in the first study to generate discussion surrounding the major research questions. Semi-structured interview, which is a more flexible version of the structured interview, allows depth to be achieved by providing the interviewer with the opportunity to probe and expand the interviewee's responses (Rubin & Rubin, 2005). This type of intervewing is popular because it is flexible, accessible and capable of revealing important and often hidden facets of human behaviour. It is seen as the most effective and convenient tool for gathering

90

As I needed diverse but clear explanations of different experiences, feelings, behaviours and emotions, I decided to conduct the interviews in Arabic as the proficiency level of English among the selected students is anticipated to be low in the research context. When writing the interview questions, I decided to carefully select words that would not offend the participant as I wanted to encourage them to speak openly about unpleasant

experiences that they have had in the past. I also avoided starting the interviews with negative wording related to sensitive topics such as: failure, weakness, humiliation, or uneducated parents because I needed to establish a good conversation and to gradually build trust and good relationships where the students would voluntarily give more details without worrying about me judging them. Three interviews were conducted with the participants within 8 months.

The predetermined questions were very general asking the participants to talk about their long language learning experiences; opening the doors for all interesting experiences and unique demotivation and remotivation stories. The general predetermined questions were divided into two categories: demotivation and remotivation questions. Indeed, the questions that I used in the interviews were not looking for particular concepts or particular answers. As I mentioned earlier, I was not interested in the factors that demotivated the learner. Instead, I was interested in how these factors affected them differently and why they responded to the demotivators in a particular way. Thus, I had to listen carefully and wait for interesting or unusual responses and then asked for more details about it. The participants were asked about their learning English journey, preconception and vision before they started it, their feelings and thoughts about a particular bad experience, the impact of different demotivating factors, the way they responded to these factors, the reasons for a particular response or feeling, their coping strategies, and their remotivation stories. For example, I asked the following questions in the first interview to find about demotivation and failure experiences:

1- What is your current situation with regard to learning English? 2- How do you feel towards learning English language?

3- Tell me everything about your learning English journey since you started until today. 4- Tell me everything that you hated and liked. Talk about your preconception and

imagination before you started your language learning journey and about your actual experience.

91

In order to explore the diverse ways in which the participants responded to demotivators and demotivation, I asked the following questions:

1- How did you respond to that event?

2- How could you manage overcoming such a difficult situation and rebuild your energy to pursue your learning journey successfully?

3- What did feel after experiencing that failure?

4- Describe your feelings when you remember that experience?

These are all the predetermined questions that I asked during the first interview. However, each learner had a different and unique story that could tell me something different about the phenomenon. I thought of the questions I have listed as a tool that encouraged the participants to reflect on their experiences openly without placing any boundaries on my vision. I asked them to describe their experience, how they felt, how they thought, how they acted, what they said, and how they reacted. The participants’ answers to the above questions generated new questions that served as probes to encourage the interviewee to dig deeper and reflect on the meaning of particular experiences (e.g. How has this experience exactly affected you?, or What exact changes have you made in your life since you had that experience?).

In order to invite the participants to give me lengthy stories, I carefully framed my opening questions for the second interview and then listened patiently and sensitively to the participants. Examples of the questions I asked in the second interviews were:

1- When you had that X bad experience, how did you feel about it, why did you respond that way, why did not you respond that way, or why didn’t it affect you?

2- Why do you think it was (difficult or easy) to overcome that experience? 3- What do you think have facilitated/obstructed your recovery?

4- Who or what do you mainly thank or blame for your (bad or good) experience?

5- You told me last time that you easily overcome bad experiences and that you surround yourself with a strong wall that protects you from negative messages that people give you about your ability, can you tell me how you learned to do this and what makes you that positive about negative events?

92

6- You told me last time that when you fail to achieve something. you feel excited and challenge yourself by trying harder. You know that other people would easily give up after experiencing failures. Why did you decide to be positive and try harder?

The purpose of the third interview was to spend sufficient time with participants to check for distortions, and to clarify some tentative responses with the participants. They were given the summary of the interpretations and findings of the two previous interviews to review and disuss. This interview mainly aimed at improving the credibility and the validity of my results. According to Guest, MacQueen, and Namey (2012), suggested “member- checking” or “respondent validation” as a method for increasing the validity of data collected and analysed. This method requires eliciting feedback from the participants after asking them to review the summarised interviews, findings, and interpretations to review and verify if they accurately reflect their intents and meanings (Byrne, 2001; Creswell & Plano Clark, 2011). It can be used immediately after data collection is suumarised and is not only postanalysis review (Patton, 2002). Although an individual’s responses might not be visible in the data summary, the participants will surely recognise some of the themes that his voice helped to create. In addition, participant’s explicit feedback should be viewed as a method to stimulate critical thinking in the author of the research and help in clarifying anything that was unclear or ambiguous (Guest, MacQueen, & Namey, 2012). Credibility refers to the confidence in the truth of the findings, including an accurate understanding of the context. The term was made popular through Lincoln and Guba’s book, Naturalistic Inquiry (1985), and is commonly used in qualitative inquiry in place of the term validity.