The Interview Schedule

At the preliminary stage, I constructed the questions of the interview schedules based on the relevant literature and research questions. The main purpose of the interview

schedule was to assist me in obtaining relevant information from participants. Drever (1995, p.18) suggested that the interview schedule can serve:

 to guide the interview,

 to remind the interviewee of the formal nature of the discussion,

 and, essentially to generate important evidence for the study.

I designed four interview schedules: one schedule explored EAL students‘ prior writing

experiences (see Appendix 4.3); the second focused on the process of writing

assignments (see Appendix 4.4); the third explored retrospectively students‘ perceptions

of academic writing and of themselves as academic writers at the end of their course (see Appendix 4.5); and, the last interview schedule was planned for interviewing tutors (see Appendix 4.6). The research interviews consisted almost entirely of open-ended

questions, which enabled me to investigate the respondents‘ views on the topics under study, establish rapport and assess what they believed about writing.

As suggested by Robson (2002), my interview schedules were organised into several sections starting with introductory remarks. This focused on establishing rapport with the interviewees and introducing the major interview topics. They continued with a list of topic headings, questions, probes and prompts. Drever (1995) ascertained that prompts encourage people to talk and recall important events; whereas probes ask

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interviewees to clarify and explain what they have said. They ended with closing comments that asked interviewees for any questions or details they wanted to raise and some expressions of thanks.

I tried to follow the interview schedules. Nevertheless, I often had to pick up

participants‘ clues, explore their responses and give space for their thoughts. Essentially,

I tried to be flexible, consider the dynamics of our interactions and not to follow closely the order of the interview schedule. Interviewees tended sometimes to provide answers to more than one question simultaneously or they themselves initiated discussion of certain issues that I initially planned for later stages in interviewing. Importantly, interviewees raised issues that I had overlooked. My main focus was, therefore, to interact, listen actively, ask questions, gain access to interviewees‘ accounts and decide on the next stages with reference to the clues emerging in the interviews.

The semi-structured interviews provided therefore interviewees with freedom to talk about topics they thought were relevant to them and to cast light on numerous issues that I had not planned. This approach engendered major shifts in the research focus and design as the study evolved. From the outset, I assumed that EAL students would face difficulties mainly with starting to write an assignment, organising the information, revising, anticipating the audience, writing grammatically accurate and managing the amount of work. As a result, interview schedules initially reflected those areas,

comprising many questions about planning, composing, revising processes and writing practices. Luckily, the use of open questions and the follow-up of students‘ leads rather

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than adhering rigidly to my interview schedule enabled me to learn what participants had to tell me.

Over the course of interviewing, students did not focus on problems with planning, composing or revising stages. Even if they had experienced difficulties at these stages, they were more likely to opt for alternative approaches to solving them. For instance, three students employed extensively L1 to search for materials, retrieve content and paraphrase the original sources into L2. Nevertheless, findings suggested that the use of L1 was not always efficient. Two students indicated that they had often misrepresented the key points of the materials when translating them into L2. Towards the middle of the year, they revealed using L1 less often. Additionally, three students reported to have hardly revised their written work before submission, or even if they did, they had focused primarily on identifying grammatical errors. Yet, they did not consider their revising approach as a problem and did not initiate a conversation about it.

Instead, students revealed that they had encountered difficulties in learning tutors‘ expectations, assessment criteria and writing conventions. They also reported finding it difficult to make sense of tutor feedback and to express their personal opinions. The preliminary data analysis indicated that there were important gaps between students‘ and tutors‘ understandings of the task requirements, of certain writing concepts and of the

dominant values, providing evidence of confusion at the level of meaning-making rather than at the level of technical and cognitive skills. The focus of data analysis and

conceptual framework, therefore, moved from an asocial aspect of writing (i.e. cognitive, linguistic) to the socially situated aspect of writing.

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This shift led to some fundamental changes in the research design to accommodate the emerging data. Firstly, it required a reconceptualisation of the theoretical framework, which shifted its emphasis from cognitive theories of writing to sociocultural theories of learning. These theories regarded writing as situated in a concrete context characterised by social interactions between writer and reader, which are mediated by shared

practices, tools and semiotic means (Prior 2006). Secondly, the shift produced some changes in the research data collection instruments. I focused less on investigating revision processes and using stimulated recall to analyse students‘ revision changes.

Finally, a new analytical framework was elaborated to analyse the emerging data. Based on sociocultural theories that emphasised the socially situated nature of writing (see section 2.2.1-2.2.3) and on Casanave‘s (1995) study (see section 2.6.3), I drew three main themes to analyse the research data: interactions with members of the discourse community (tutors, peers and teacher-assistants), with the trainingsystem (taught modules, writing assignments, academic writing class, CELTE support) and with institutional artefacts (samples of previously written work, published guidelines and assessment criteria). Hence, once I gained a better understanding of what wa s happening within the research I tried to refocus it to accommodate the emerging data and evolving findings.