Potential Methodological Concerns and Justification

All in all, CA-informed methodology with its focus on the details of talk enables to scrutinise the specific features of teachers’ use of interactional code-switching.

However, due to the consideration of applying the SETT framework (Walsh, 2006; 2011; 2013), this study may potentially be questioned from three main aspects for which it is deemed appropriate to provide a further clarification here. Additionally, the concerns regarding the removal of corpus linguistics (CL) need to be addressed.

4.6.1 CA: Looking at intentions/standards of CS?

The starting point of this study is from the proposed ideas and calls to use CS

judiciously (Atkinson, 1987), purposefully, intelligently (Macara, 2009; Hall and Cook, 2013) and the like. This may mislead the understanding, i.e., the research is to use CA looking at intentions (due to the notion of “purposeful use”) or standards (because of the notions of “judicious use” and “intelligent use”) of the teachers’ CS employment.

In fact, this is absolutely NOT the case. This study firstly is not simply of teachers’ intention and purpose, but of the display of their intention or purpose, which is a “piece of interactional business” that is visible to the public (Antaki and Wetherell, 1999, pp. 7- 8). Here, the intention or purpose is linked to the teachers’ display of their pedagogical purpose and how this orientation display is understood by the students in the

interaction. Therefore, as to the analysis, the sequential patterns and interactional features of CS in relation to the pedagogical orientations are identified and interpreted on the turn-by-turn basis, rather than from the analyst’s perspective or the participant’s report.

As to the notions concerning the quality of CS use, this study does not go for any

prescription or set up standards about the good or bad quality of the CS use. Rather, by analysing the CS use by modes (i.e., the micro-contexts) under the SETT framework on a moment-by-moment basis, the study links the quality of CS use and classroom

79

relationship between the CS use and CIC by taking both CS employment and CIC to be interactional matters (for the reflections of CIC on the basis of the findings related to the

CS use in the current study, see Section 11.3.3 in Chapter 11).

4.6.2 Can CA work within SETT?

As both a theoretical framework and a methodological tool, SETT (Walsh, 2006; 2011; 2013) was introduced in the present research. The aptness of SETT may be challenged in two aspects. The first one is that SETT may lead the data to face the risk of being analysed from an outsider’s or the etic perspective, in that SETT is considered to be an external theoretical framework being incorporated into CA. The other challenging issue may come from characterising the CS occurrence by different modes under SETT, i.e., using the pre-determined categories to carry out the top-down data analysis.

However, CA does not deny goal-oriented spoken interactions, and can be applied to L2 classroom with a pre-determined aim of learning L2 (Walsh, 2013, p. 28). Walsh’s (2006; 2011; 2013) SETT characterises the orientation of the nature of classroom teaching on the macro level and specifies features of interaction in the micro-contexts. In brief, SETT, a theoretical framework though, is just highlighting the link between classroom interaction and the local context. This originally aims to help lead the

attention to the very context-sensitive classroom interaction in different micro-contexts rather than predetermine a framework for a top-down examination. Therefore,

introducing the SETT in the current research does not oppose to examine CS from the emic-participants’ perspective.

The modes in SETT emerge from “the reflexive relationship between pedagogy and instruction in the L2 classroom” (Seedhouse, 2004, p. 66), and show a further understanding of the ‘reflexive relationship’. It links the pedagogical goals and the related interactional features they shape to construct the basis of SETT grid under the notion of CIC (Sert, 2010). The modes share the same tradition and nature as pointed by Seedhouse (2004), “L2 classroom interaction is not an undifferentiated whole but can be divided into a number of sub-varieties or classroom context” (p. 205). Modes in SETT are also dynamic and can be taken as the sub-contexts or micro-contexts of the L2 classroom. This comes from Walsh’s (2013, p. 27) similar points of view that a whole lesson is an integration of “dynamic and variable” contexts and “multi-layered structure”

80

of classroom interaction (for detailed discussion of the understanding of contexts and

the contexts used in the current study, see Chapter 3).

In this respect, the sequential patterns and interactional features of CS, analysed “at the micro level of context” with the emphasis on “ heterogeneity, uniqueness and the

‘instanced’ nature of the interaction”, is also in accordance with the CA working principle that looks at the every bit of the interaction to find out the salient instances and features from talk-in- interaction (Seedhouse, 2004, p. 212).

4.6.3 Coding modes: Antithetical to CA?

As described in Section 4.5.1, the modes were detected at Step 1. However, this may give rise to the question, whether these steps of coding can still keep the CA

sensibilities. In fact, this issue has been addressed when discussing whether CA can work within SETT in Section 4.6.2, and how to apply a “CA-grounded formal coding approach” in Section 4.5.1. Firstly, the mode detection is compatible with CA principles, in that the application of modes is only to assist to locate context-sensitive classroom interaction in different dynamic micro-contexts. Secondly, only a CA-grounded formal coding that is built directly on the ground of CA methods and the dimensions of position and composition, can the mode coding be made possible to “maintain the sensibilities of a CA approach to interaction while reducing interaction to formal codes (Stivers, 2015, p. 8). Therefore, to make it clear to the readers, this section just provides a reiteration of the argument that coding modes “not necessarily antithetical to conversation analysis” (Stivers, 2015, p. 1).

4.6.4 Removal of CL: Did it make a difference?

As mentioned previously in 4.2.2, corpus linguistics (CL), i.e., applied CL, was originally considered to be a complementary analytical tool. However, it was removed after the fieldwork because of several reasons. The first reason was superficial and practical, which concerns with managing the large database. After the completion of data collection and presentation during the annual panel in June 2015, I was advised to remove CL, in that it was too ambitious to take care of 31-hour recordings. That is, 31- hour recordings, as a large database, may work for CL analysis, whereas the large amount of data yielded from the very detailed transcripts for CA’s analysis may not be

81

intensively analysed due to the time limits for doing research and limited space for the thesis writing.

Secondly, the complementarity(Greene et al., 1989) or significance enhancement (Collins et al., 2006) of employing CL as a quantitative technique was reconsidered. In order to investigate how the sequential patterns of CS are related to its functions within the different modes, CL was considered to look at the relationships between functions of CS (coded according to Ferguson’s (2003) category), sequential patterns of CS and the different modes. However, only the relationship between functions and modes does not matter much to analyse the sequential patterns under functions by modes. The key word frequency obtained from CL may indicate how the CS sequential patterns are linked to some top key words under a certain function, such as the word “page” being found related to occurrence of CS in managerial mode in Waer’s (2012) study.

However, The sequential analysis shows that the CS use in relation to “page” only takes place when a mode shift occurs in the current study, and the sequential pattern recurrently presents as “plain translation of task/activity-located instruction”(for detailed

examples, see Extract 6.5-6.7). In this regard, the examination of the frequency of

functions in relation to modes and key words does not contribute much to maximising the researcher’s interpretation of data (Onwuegbuzie and Leech, 2006).

Furthermore, the research purpose, research questions and methodological design are reflexive (Onwuegbuzie and Leech, 2006). The reconsideration of applying CL revealed two aspects which are not convincing. In the first sense, mixed methods research studies typically require to develop “at least one qualitative research question and at least one quantitative research question” (Onwuegbuzie and Leech, 2006, p. 480), while there is only one qualitative research question in the current study, i.e., What are the sequential patterns and interactional features of CS in EFL teacher talk in a Chinese university setting?. In addition, it is not sensible to look at the frequency of sequential patterns completely emerging from the participants’ interactional business, in that “to characterise previously unidentified interactional practices” “cannot be done by coding and counting”(Drew and Heritage, 2006, p. 13).

Regarding the influence caused by the removal of CL, the direct one is on the reduction of database and the accompanied issues in terms of data preference and size of

82

coverage of different areas were the priorities for having the rich qualified data. In addition, in order to have sufficient CS instances, the recordings were transcribed progressively. The details of setting up the final database is described and discussed in Section 5.3.2.