Methods used in the pilot study

In the pilot study, I used a questionnaire for learners, texts written by learners, texts written by experts, an experiment, post-instruction interviews and a diary. These methods are explained in detail below, but prior to that explanation, it may be worth saying that in the period between the pilot study and the main study, I was engaged in constant reading and reflections on the methods used in the pilot study, so that in the main study some methods were dropped and others were kept for the reasons that will be explained in the present subsection.

The questionnaire was submitted to 65 respondents randomly selected from a population of 130 employees and was aimed at gathering eight datasets corresponding to eight questions in the questionnaire. The first question helped me to learn participants’ ages. At that point of the study, I deemed learning participants’ ages necessary as participants whose ages are below 18 require their parents’ consent to participate in a study (BERA, 2011, Guideline 18). The second question provided me with the information regarding the time participants had been working in the target workplace. With that question, I particularly aimed at gaining insights into the extent to which old employees continued learning English. In the third question I aimed to understand whether participants had learned English before joining the target workplace as such data would shed some light on the extent to which effort should be made in helping the target learners

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with the learning of English. In other words, the fewer the employees who had previously learned English, the more effort would be needed to help learners with their learning of English.

The remaining four questions can be explained as follows. In the fourth question, I asked the types of work participants did, namely field work, office work or both field work and office work. It was expected that the more office work participants did, the more writing they probably practised, and therefore more support with writing was necessary. Similarly, in the fifth question I asked the frequency with which the target learners used the four language skills namely listening, speaking, reading and writing in order to see the extent to which writing was exercised. In the sixth question, I asked how the target learners felt about their knowledge of the four skills. In the seventh question, I went further into asking the type of texts that the target learners most frequently wrote in their workplace, and in the eighth question I asked the channels through which the texts were submitted. Again, in this question I aimed to learn the extent to which writing was a worthwhile area on which to focus.

Regarding texts, 32 learners’ (sample texts) were collected from 16 volunteers. In such texts, I aimed to learn the communicative purposes and determine the genres used in the target workplace. Seventeen texts written by experts were obtained from the textbooks designed for teaching business writing in different workplaces (Hogan, 2005; Poe, 2006; Brieger, 2011). In those texts, I aimed to learn the moves and the linguistic

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features chosen by the expert writers with a view to helping the target learners with their writing.

The experiment was aimed at simultaneously exploring the effects of explicit and implicit genre-based approaches in a classroom. For that aim, I formed two experimental groups, and each group was composed of 10 participants. Each group served as the control for the other, and the groups received instructions for five days (an hour a day).

Since I am employed in the target workplace as a teacher, I had to balance between work and research commitments at the time. Therefore, to carry out the experiment, I agreed with a co-worker to teach the implicit- genre group while I was teaching the explicit-genre group. I designed a teaching plan (Appendix 3) to help my co-worker with the implicit-genre group, and the plan for the implicit-genre group comprised comprehension questions of the texts that were used with the explicit-genre group.

To assess learning in the experiment, in the pilot phase, I had participants write a pre-test and a post-test. The tests comprised the texts participants wrote by responding to prompts, which are presented later in the present chapter. Other details provided later are the measures that were assessed. Such details are not provided here to avoid repetitions since the procedure followed in the pilot study is almost the same as the procedure followed in the main study.

The post-instruction interviews were mainly aimed at seeking participants’ opinions about the experiment, and this was an attempt to use the ‘follow-

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up task’ stage (Yasuda 2011, p. 116). Following are the explanations on the duration of the interviews, the venue, topics discussed and characterisation of the interviews for each group of participants. Then, a brief account of the different approaches used in interviewing the two groups is provided.

In the explicit-genre group, I interviewed each of the ten participants for a minimum of 10 minutes, and the interviews took place in my office. I recorded (audio) the interviews with the participants’ consent. In the interviews I sought to understand participants’ opinions about the tasks they had just done in the experiment, their perception of the relevance of the materials they had used and the time the experiment had taken. Other questions followed from these topics since the interviews were ‘semi- structured’ as opposed to ‘structured’ and ‘unstructured’ interviews (Nunan, 1992, p. 149; Bryman, 2008, p. 438). In structured interviews, participants’ answers only depend on researcher’s questions and in unstructured interviews participants elaborate freely on their views (Nunan, 1992; Bryman, 2008). The interviews with the participants in the explicit genre-group were semi-structured as I needed to first focus on specific points such as the participants’ opinions about the genre tasks.

The interviews with the implicit-genre group took 20 minutes and were conducted as a whole class, a ‘focus group’ (Bryman, 2008, p. 473), in the participants’ classroom. Instead of using all the topics used with the explicit-genre group as a starting point, I asked participants to simply comment on the importance of the tasks they had carried out during the

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lessons and the two texts they had used (similar to those in Appendix 4). While the interviews with the explicit-genre group were audio-recorded and structured, the interviews with the implicit genre-group were not; I only used a diary (explained below) in which I noted the participants’ comments, and the interviews were unstructured.

My use of different approaches when interviewing the explicit-genre group and when interviewing the implicit-genre group is attributable to the ways the groups were taught. That is, the explicit-genre group received explicit instruction whereas the implicit-genre group received implicit instruction. The different ways the groups were taught made me feel that more explicit questions could be asked for the explicit-genre group and for the implicit genre group a more open-ended approach could be better in order to understand their discovery of the points they deemed paramount during exposure in the classroom. However, it should be recognised that approaching the groups in different ways constitutes a gap as it runs counter to fairness in treating research participants (BERA, 2011, Guideline 24), a point that I missed when interviewing the groups in the pilot study.

The last method I used in the pilot study, as mentioned above, was a diary. The diary I used resembles what is called ‘the diary as a log of the researcher’s activities’ (Bryman, 2008, p. 225). This diary is different from the ‘diary as a method for data collection’ and the ‘diary as a document’ (Bryman, 2008, p. 225). The last two types of diaries are written at a researcher’s request, but the diary I used in the pilot study was my

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document to keep track of the data when audio recording was impossible. Succinctly, the methods used in the pilot study provided a basis for the main study, but my revision and reflection on them resulted in some changes to which I turn in the next subsection.