Research methodology

The methodology underpinning this study lay in using a mixed method paradigm. It adopted both qualitative and quantitative methods to collect and analyze data, which were expected to strengthen the merits and make up for the weakness for both sides. There were 500 university students who joined in the survey and 20 of them took part in the semi-structured interviews, ranging from 18 years to 23 years old in eight major departments in Central China Normal University. Data collection methods were in the form of questionnaire and semi-structured interviews, which were designed according to the research aims and conducted in relation to the English learning and teaching experiences based on participants’ views. The data collection process was divided into two stages: a quantitative stage and qualitative stage. The research tool in the quantitative stage was a 65- item questionnaire, which was first distributed to the students of each department. Data gathered in this stage was analyzed through a statistical software: PASW (formerly SPSS Statistics) version 21. At the second stage, semi-structured interviews were conducted to get a further detailed understanding. At this stage , the participants’ views were analyzed using a constructivist grounded theory with three coding steps and a thematic analysis (Sarantakos, 2005). The textual data were conducted at this stage was NVivo software version 10.

1.6.1 The quantitative stage

The quantitative stage was the first phase in this research and it utilized quantitative method. The data were mainly numbers collected from the questionnaire that was designed to achieve research goals. The different scores and various attributes were measured according to participants’ responses, and two groups of variables were compared in relation to experiences of high schools and the university (Creswell, 2007). The quantitative stage mainly used a deductive approach to undertake research, which enabled the researcher to make hypotheses according to previous studies discussed in the literature (Johnson & Christensen, 2008). These hypotheses were later examined through the survey performed in the data collection process (Babbie, 2011). At the end of this stage, the researcher could find out the results of the participants’ responses and compare them in conjunction with relevant literature.

At this stage, a questionnaire was developed and utilized to collect data to investigate the attitudes and views of university students in relation to their learning and teaching experiences of English. The questionnaire was designed adopting a five-point Likert scale (1932), which is a recognized tool for measuring attitudinal responses (Burns & Burns, 2008), and was employed to provide insight into the participants’ perceptions about, and their attitudes to the English teaching and learning experience they had in both high schools and university. Therefore, a questionnaire designed in this form was considered as the most suitable data collection instrument (J. A. Hatch, 2002). The questions and statements in the questionnaire were designed based on the relevant literature and aimed to achieve research objectives. The participants invited in this study were required to indicate on a five Likert scale, from ‘Strongly Agree’ to ‘Strongly Disagree’ to freely express their feelings for each question/statement. Their responses to the questionnaire were analyzed by SPSS version 21. Within this study, descriptive analysis was firstly conducted. Within this analysis, median values are an important indicator to find out the participants’ degree of agreement on the questionnaire items. And then the Kruskal-Wallis test and Mann-Whitney U Test were applied to examine whether there is significant difference between groups and where these differences occur. Lastly, the correlation analysis was used to determine the relationship between variables in the questionnaire (Fan, 2011).

1.6.2 The qualitative stage

A qualitative research method was adopted in the second stage, which was believed to analyze the data in a natural way (Babbie, 2011). Compared with the quantitative research method, qualitative research method is more “pragmatic,

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interpretive, and grounded in people’s living experience” (Marshall & Rossman, 2010, p. 2). To focus on context is one of the hallmarks of qualitative research (Rossman & Rallis, 2012). Thus, adopting a qualitative method in the subject university within the Chinese context was the most suitable and natural way to know the participants’ ideas of their experiences through learning and teaching. Meanwhile, it is beneficial for the researcher to construct meanings according to participants’ responses. In contrast to the first stage, the qualitative stage provided textual data with insights of the participants into their learning experiences and teachers’ teaching experiences in the university. At this stage, an inductive approach was adopted to research that reasoning works the other way, moving from specific observations to broader generalizations and theories (Thomas, 2006). The researcher used this method to seek the raw data into categories and themes that were grounded in participants’ views to generate a model and form new theories.

The semi-structured interview with 10 focus questions was used as a data collection tool in the second stage. This form of interview was chosen as it provided “in-depth information pertaining to participants’ experiences and viewpoints of a specific topic” (Turner, 2010, p. 754). In this study, these 10 focus questions were designed for university students to seek answers to achieve research goals. In the light of using the questionnaire in the first stage, the semi- structured interview adopted at this stage allowed participants more freedom to express their opinions of learning experiences and teachers’ teaching in high schools and in the university. Also, this form of data collection benefits the researcher in gathering more in-depth data from the participants’ responses in elaborating explicitly.

The researcher employed the constructivist grounded theory and thematic analysis to interpret the textual data at the qualitative stage. The constructivist grounded theory guided the researcher to break the data analysis into open coding, axial coding and selective coding steps. (Charmaz, 2006; Strauss & Corbin, 1994). The main focus of this method is to extract upper-level themes from a larger number of codes and phenomenon. A thematic analysis is regarded as one of the most commonly used methods of qualitative analysis (Howitt & Cramer, 2011). The researcher could identify limited themes to adequately reflect the textual data through adopting the thematic analysis. In this research, this thematic analysis was believed to facilitate constructing and generating core categories based on the participants’ responses in the semi-structured interviews (Fan, 2011). It also helped the researcher to sort out codes, find out patterns, and later develop

theories in relation to their views of learning and teaching model preferences in the data analysis process.