Pilot study procedures and analysis

After ethical approval for the pilot study had been granted by the university, information sheets and consent forms for the pilot study were produced, and the appropriate permissions were obtained.

4.4.2.1. Questionnaire

The questionnaire was piloted with two year 8 German classes in School A, a large mixed comprehensive school, in July 2015. The researcher was known to the school from previous research projects, and she administered the questionnaire herself in both classes with each class teacher observing. It took learners a maximum of 15 minutes to complete the questionnaire. After the class had completed the questionnaire, learner feedback was invited. Participants indicated that although they did find some of the questions unusual (such as ’if German was a food’, ‘if German was an animal’), they could, in fact, cope with this kind of task, and that they found filling in the questionnaire interesting. It became clear that learners were keen to share their answers and to engage in discussions about what they had written. Most learners were able to answer all the questions. Learners’ answers in section B, the Family Fortunes task, showed that participants were able to distinguish between their own opinion and their perception of public opinion. The questionnaire was administered in hard copy, and some learners’ handwriting proved hard to decipher, which would be a good reason to provide the questionnaire in digital format for the main study.

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Learners’ responses to the qualitative questionnaire items were thoughtful and creative. For example, one learner wrote “If German was a food, it would be a mushroom,

because I can’t understand why some people like it”. Such a response condenses several

levels of meaning in one short statement, as it provides an insight into the learner’s

attitudes towards German (they do not like it), their perceptions of other people’s attitudes (some like it), but also their own positioning towards other people’s attitudes (the

respondent does not understand them).

Learner motivation data from the pilot were analysed statistically via SPSS. Learners were split into ‘German continuers’ and ‘German droppers’. Non-parametric (Mann-Whitney U) tests, chosen because the data were not normally distributed, showed that continuers displayed significantly higher motivation levels than droppers for

perception of value and self-efficacy, but not for learning situation or for overall

motivation. Full results are not reported for reasons of space. This result was promising in that it foreshadowed differences between learners’ motivation levels by sub-scale, which was going to be investigated further in the main study.

Regarding the sub-scales of the composite motivation construct (learning situation, self-efficacy, value, instrumental and integrative orientation), scale reliability tests with the pilot study data indicated that it would be make the motivation questionnaire more robust if more items per scale than just one or two could be included.

4.4.2.2. Focus groups

Two learner focus groups were conducted in School B in March 2015, and consisted of four students each; one year 9 (KS3) and one year 11 (KS4) group. Focus groups took 45 minutes and were conducted in lesson time. Some learners in each focus group had chosen German for the following year and some had not. The pilot focus group schedule (Appendix C) included group tasks which were the same as the individual

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questionnaire tasks, where learners were asked to engage in a group discussion in order to come to a consensus about their answers. On reflection it was felt that it would be more useful for the study proper to use participants’ questionnaire responses, and responses in the focus group on the themes of the motivation questionnaire, as a basis for group discussion. This would allow learners’ previously stated beliefs to be explored more deeply, rather than opening up new lines of enquiry through new activities.

4.4.2.3. Interviews

The pilot teacher interview took place in March 2016 with the Head of German from School B. The interview schedule contained some of the same tasks as the focus group schedule, however the words “learning German” were replaced with “teaching German” for the teacher interview. The teacher interview began by the interviewer asking the teacher to set the scene as regards language learning at the school, followed by the tasks, followed by a similar discussion around German learning choices to the student focus group, adjusted to take the interviewee’s role into account. On reflection it was felt that there was more to be gained from using the time available to gain the teacher’s insights into their perception of the attitudes of their students towards German, rather than on the tasks.

4.4.2.4. Press corpus

As the school settings research instruments were being developed and piloted, the press corpus based on articles around German, the Germans, and Germany (4.2.1.4. above) was being compiled, and preliminary explorations were conducted. The corpus was

cleaned of metadata and duplicates, and compiled through the uploading of the text file containing all 40,169 UK articles on German* onto the online corpus analysis tool Sketch

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Engine. The uploaded corpus consisted of 35,959,493 tokens, or 30,376,325 words. In this context, a token is each individual occurrence of a word, whereas in corpus linguistics a word means a word form, so identical words are only counted once (hence the number of tokens is usually higher than the number of words). Explorative queries for collocates of German, Germans, and Germany were run. This procedure consisted of the generation of concordance lists for each node word of German, Germans, and Germany. A concordance is a list of all the occurrences of a search term in a corpus, with some co-text (text

occurring immediately to the left and right of the search term). From each of these three concordance lists, a collocation list was compiled, and sorted by Log-Likelihood (LL), a measure of statistical significance. A high LL-score denotes a strong relationship between the two collocates. Collocates were then categorised, with a light touch, into themes. Some meaningful themes such as politics/politicians, other European countries, and the

East/West split, and the Nazi past, could be already be gleaned from these lists, but needed to be explored in more detail as the context in which they were used would be crucial for interpretation. Full details of corpus data processing are given under 7.1. below.

Nevertheless, piloting of the corpus data indicated that pursuing the lines of enquiry by thematically categorising collocates for German, Germans, and Germany appeared to be a worthwhile endeavour.