Interview

Critics (Dӧrnyei, 2007) have argued that interviews have weaknesses, such as being time- consuming, the good communication skills that the interviewer must have, or the unpredictability of the interviewees’ speech styles. However, interview data were still considered useful for this study because an interview is usually conducted in a natural social setting where people can express their opinions about the given topic in a conversation, instead of providing written information only. The interviews implemented in this study pursued the aim of understanding how the three cognitive linguistic approaches might assist Mandarin Chinese-speaking English learners with meaning construction on particles relating to phrasal verbs. As a result, these interviews would provide richer qualitative data for the researcher to further assess to what extent each of the cognitive linguistic approaches could facilitate teaching and learning particles in phrasal verbs in EFL, and complement the quantitative data gained from the results of the pre-test and the post-test.

Dörnyei (2007: 136) suggests that ‘In applied linguistic research most interviews conducted belong to the “semi-structured interview” type, which offers a compromise between two extremes: although there is a set of pre-prepared guiding questions and prompts, the format is open-ended and the interviewee is encouraged to elaborate on the issues raised in an exploratory manner.’ This study wished to take advantage of semi-

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structured interviews to compensate for the weakness of the quantitative data, because the quantitative data obtained from the test results are likely to overlook much of the depth and breadth of the respondents’ stories. The semi-structured interview was seen as an appropriate tool to probe more deeply into the research questions.

Preparation for the interviews in this study consisted of a series of carefully designed steps: finalising the sampling plan, formulating the interview questions, piloting the interview, and preparing an interview guide. First of all, the finalised sampling plan was determined to collect data from the U.K and Taiwan, given that participants were mainly recruited from these two sites. The interviews were conducted in English, because that would help while coding the interview question data.

When it comes to formulating interview questions, Patton (2002) suggests that six major types of content question can be asked on any given topic in an interview: (1) biodata or background information, (2) sensory information, (3) experiences and behaviours (4) feeling, (5) knowledge; (6) opinions and values. I articulated six question items to reflect three types of content question that Patton suggests, that is, one feeling question, one knowledge question, and four questions in relation to opinions and values. These questions helped the researcher to understand the participants’ overall view and their experience of learning particles within phrasal verbs in the training sessions given for this study. In order to encourage the interviewees to offer a more full response to questions, salient content words such as ‘Yes, how?’ or ‘No, why?’ were provided as prompts to help generate more elaboration on the question.

After drafting the interview questions, the researcher ran two interview pilots conducted in English: one was interviewing an English native speaker and the other was a Mandarin Chinese native speaker. An issue of wording emerged from the pilot interviews so the researcher revised the wording of the questions, following suggestions offered in the qualitative interview literature: posing brief, simple questions with one idea at a time. Moreover, the researcher added a final question item— ‘Is there anything else you would like to say?’ in the closing stage of interview. The entire set of interview questions with prompts is included in the interview guide (see Appendix O). It has been suggested that an interview guide can play a useful role in data collection (Dörnyei, 2007; McCracken, 1988), so a suitable interview guide was prepared. In this study, the interview guide had the following functions: (1) offering a list of suggested interview questions and prompts aiming to investigate research question two, (2) ensuring that the interview would follow standard procedures; (3) providing a framework for the researcher to employ in the process of interview. During the interviews, the researcher kept an interview log to record the details and content provided by the interviewees as well as the interviewer’s own

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comments and notes. To sum up, the interview guide along with the interview log helped the researcher to maintain the quality of the interviews, and offered more space and time to record as much information as possible.

Interviews were conducted in the U.K and Taiwan with randomly selected participants who had completed all the training sessions in the use of the cognitive linguistic approaches adopted in this study. On account of the proportion of participants recruited in this study, five participants (2 from the UK and 3 from Taiwan) were chosen from each of the training groups for interview using the same set of interview questions, aiming to explore the participants’ experience of learning particles in phrasal verbs via the cognitive linguistic approaches. The selection of interviewees was done by drawing lots. Their individual names were written on a sheet of paper, rolled and placed in a box. The box was shaken well to give an even distribution of pieces of paper. Two names were picked from the labelled boxes in the U.K. and three were picked in Taiwan. After selecting the interviewees, the interviews were conducted on a one-to-one basis. A list of suggested interview questions (see Appendix O) was given to the individual interviewee three to five minutes before the actual interview started. There are two benefits of giving the interview questions in advance: one is the opportunity to clarify any confusion over the questions; the other is to allow the interviewee some time to reflect on his or her learning experience and what has been gained from the training sessions.

At the outset of each interview, the purpose of the research and the need for audio- recording the interview were explained to the individual interviewee. Two types of qualitative data were gathered during the interview, that is, note-taking and audio- recorded data. The literature indicates that note-taking in a semi-structured interview is not enough for the researcher seeking to record all the details given by the participants. The advantage of audio-recorded data is that it can provide information missing from the notes made during the interview, because an interview is a demanding activity with a number of aspects that the interviewer needs to deal with simultaneously. In order to record the interview data as fully as possible, the researcher used an interview log to combine the interview guide (as described above) with her interview notes and comments, as well as the audio-recorded data obtained from each individual interview. All the data were then compiled into one computer file that could help the researcher analyse the data in an economical and efficient manner.