Interview design

The interviews can be classified as structured or semi-structured (Oyoo, 2009). This depends on the types of questions the interviewer poses to the respondent. In a structured interview, the interviewer takes the lead with some guidelines, where the set of questions used is rigorous with no permission to divert (McMillan & Schumacher, 2010; Creswell, 2012). On the other hand, a semi-structured interview is open, permiting the interviewer to bring in new ideas during the interview depending on the interviewee’s responses. Also, in a semi- structured interview, there is a framework of themes that have to be explored. In this study, the researcher followed the semi-structured interview for both learners and teachers in order to obtain more information. It enables participants to freely express themselves to some extent, but, at the same time be guided by what the researcher is focussing on in terms of the

aims and objectives of the study. The researcher used a learner interview schedule and a teacher interview schedule as a guideline for the interviews in this study.

The learner participants were to be asked about the link between the meanings of some selected words in connection with what they selected as the meaning of those words in the questionnaire items and what their teachers taught them. As explained earlier in the opening statement of this section, the interview was used to augment the learner participants’ choices in their questionnaire answers, and, to give them room to explain the reasoning behind their choices. The teachers were, in turn, to be interviewed about their learners’ responses in the questionnaire as well as the learner interview responses. This implies that the teacher participant’s interview was about their learners responses (for the questionnaire and interview). Interviews were to help to provide clarifications about particular responses and also to give flexibility in reasons (or lack of reasons) in favour of a particular answer (Smith, 1990) in McMillan & Schumacher (2010, p. 355).

The semi-structured interview schedule questioning with funnelling was first introduced by Chiuer et al. (1999) where the questioning technique is initially more general and then becoming more specific. They generally probe the interviewee’s knowledge of the background or contextual factors of the surrounding community. In this study, the researcher also employed this type of interview questions because they “minimize power differential between the interviewer and the interviewee” (McMillan & Schumacher, 2010, p. 355) by making the participant feel relaxed. The following excerpt is an example of funnelling in a teacher interview for school Q in this study:

R: Alright, I would like you to give me a brief background of your school…..Eh……like what kind of school is this one, for example, is it a former Model C school or what…………..

T: I believe this is a former Model C School, eh, but normally most of our learners come from Soweto, even though we also enrol learners from the surrounding areas of Bez Valley, Kensington and some from Yeoville……it’s actually a mixture……..they don’t actually come from one fixed area…..

In the discussion, the interviewer (R) asks the participant teacher (T) about the school’s background at the beginning of the interview. The respondent provides an answer that will later on become an important source of information about the context of the school and the participant learners involved in the study.

In all the five schools, the student interviews were conducted immediately after the Questionnaire was administered to the participant learners. Owing to time limitations, the learners were interviewed as one group instead of ideally dividing them into two or smaller groups. An example of the questions in the learner interview schedule included the following whilst the full semi structured interview schedule for learners is in Appendix B:

1. Is the word ……… familiar to you? If so, when did you first encounter the word?

 How often have you used the word? Where? How?

 How often do your teachers in the science classrooms use this word?  You gave ………., as the meaning of this word. How did

you arrive at this as the meaning of the word?

As mentioned earlier, the teacher’s interview was to follow after the researcher had analysed the student participants’ questionnaire and interview answers. An example of some of the questions included in the teacher participants’ interview schedule is shown below: (The full text Schedule is in Appendix B)

1. What does the word ……… mean to you? Many of your learners gave………. as the meaning of this word. Do you agree with their definition? Why?

2. Which topics or sections do you normally use this word in your science lessons?  Do you normally explain or provide the meaning of this word to your

learners?

In order to summarise the approach followed to collect data, the strategy is shown in Figure 3.2. The questionnaire was the prime method of data collection using the learners whilst the interviews were complementary methods of data collection.

FIGURE 3.2: Summary of the data collection strategy

Now that the methods of data collection have been fully discussed, the next section analyses the piloting and then the sampling involved in this study.

QUESTIONNAIRE  LEARNERS

INTERVIEWS  LEARNERS