Sampling Data and Participant Information

Selecting subjects for the interviews was conducted through a purposive sampling technique (Cohen, Manion, & Morrison, 2018, p.218). It was important that the subjects were members of the teaching team at the Language Centre and were actively teaching on the pre-sessional programme. No distinction was made between teachers employed on a temporary basis

specifically for the purpose of teaching on the pre-sessional programmes and those with a permanent contract. Neither was any distinction made in the level of participation that the teachers had within their respective programmes (some teachers had more contact time with students in both number of classes taught per week and number of weeks taught).

Access to the teachers was gained first through the Language Centre director who acted as gatekeeper. It was advantageous that as a former member of the pre-sessional teaching team and as a sessional lecturer in the academic teaching staff, I was known personally to all the potential participants. This helped enormously in creating trust and rapport with the participants. That said, in order to conform to university research ethics and practices, it was important to be consistent in my approach (see section 3.7 for a discussion of the ethical considerations that were taken into account in this phase of the research).

In all, a total of nine members of staff agreed to participate in the interviews. All of the participants agreed to complete a survey of demographic information (see Appendix L for a copy). The demographics show that of the nine participants, three were non-native English speakers (all three with Slavic language backgrounds), and apart from one participant, all were multi-lingual to varying degrees of proficiency in a wide variety of languages, including German, Japanese and Bulgarian, to name a few. In terms of educational qualifications, all nine were educated to at least Masters degree level (two of these Masters degrees where combined Bachelor’s and Masters formats), and two additionally to doctoral degree level. The range of undergraduate degrees studied showed that original degree areas also varied and included the expected subject areas of English language and literature (with linguistics), but also included other subject areas of philosophy, psychology, and engineering. Finally, in terms of teaching experience, there was a wide spread, from 1 to over 20 years.

Before considering why one-to-one interviews were chosen as the method to collect qualitative data, it is important to consider the context of the potential participants and their needs and how those needs coincide with the needs of the researcher. A feature of pre- sessional programmes is the fact that they are extremely time-intensive, in terms of time dedicated to teaching, time dedicated to lesson preparation and time completing administrative duties. At a personal level it is important to consider which methods were available and which were the most potentially appealing to this subject group. Two other methods were considered, including questionnaire surveys and focus groups. Each of the methods have their associated strengths and weaknesses; however, as will be shown below, they were unable to meet the needs of the teachers or the researcher, or were impractical for other reasons.

Questionnaire surveys are attractive to researchers for their apparent simplicity. The key strength of this method lies in the efficiency in time, effort and financial resources it creates by being able to generate a large amount of data very quickly and easily. They appear to be simple to use by the respondent, even though in terms of design they are not so: it is very easy

to ill-construct questionnaires, thus producing unreliable and invalid data. It is this efficiency and simplicity that would appeal to the teachers on this course. However, this strength only arises when used for quantitative data collection, where respondents would select answers to questions from pre-determined options thus allowing tabulation and manipulation for statistical analysis of the responses. It is for this reason that questionnaire surveys should only be used as a way of providing ‘thin’ descriptions of the data under analysis (Dörnyei, 2007, p.115) and are not recommended for when the researcher wishes to probe deeply into an issue. For that to happen, the questionnaire surveys would have to employ open questions, and the respondents would be required to take a considerable amount of time to think about, write and edit their responses. This requires a great deal of effort on their part and could be considered by many to be unacceptably time consuming, and therefore unappealing. It could result in receiving minimal responses, empty responses or in refusal to participate. Therefore, it can be seen that the usefulness of questionnaire surveys diminishes when qualitative data is the objective of their use.

The other data collection method that was considered was ‘focus groups’. This is an extremely useful and popular method for collecting qualitative data from sample populations where the interaction and discussion between the participants within a group is important (Bloor, et al. 2001, as cited in Barbour, 2008, p.133)) and to ‘uncover why people think as they do’ (Morgan, 1988, as cited in Barbour, 2008, p.133)). Although it is not of vital importance to consider group dynamics on the issue of learning and teaching beliefs with regard to modality, it could generate additional insights, and may encourage participants to address the topic of modality as a collective when they normally would not do so as an individual (Barbour, 2008, p.134). Another advantage of using the focus group is the size of the groups involved. Although it is stated that there is no ‘magic number’ per se (Barbour, 2007, p.59), it is quoted that maximum efficiency is obtained when between 6-8 (Kitzenger & Barbour, 1999) or 6-10 (Dörnyei, 2007, p.144) participants are used. This is useful because the maximum number of potential participants for this phase of the research was 10. However, despite these positives, there are some inherent difficulties with using focus groups, the issue of ‘time’ being the greatest. It would be impractical to attempt to get teachers to come together outside of their normal routines to conduct a focus group, and by extension to attempt to do so on more than one occasion. Another problem associated with this method is the risk that opinions given in the group may conform to what is considered socially acceptable within the group and/or certain individuals within the group may dominate the discussion and thereby skew the results (Smithson, 2000). In terms of transcribing the recorded data, it is difficult to distinguish who is speaking. A common response to this problem is to compliment the audio recordings with video recordings, however, this adds to the complexity of the analysis of the data.

Taking these considerations into account, it can be seen that one-to-one interviews would help address the concerns and needs of the teachers involved. They would respond to their timing needs and would allow them to not feel compelled to say what is considered acceptable within the teaching group and therefore speak freely; neither would it allow the participants to be dominated by their peers. Another important point to note is that by not using video recordings the visually unidentifiable data increases the participants’ anonymity.

The success of the uptake of participants was due to the flexibility of the researcher to their timing needs. This can be seen through the variety of times at which the interviews took place. The nine interviews were conducted over five different days during the month of August 2012. Once the interviewees had agreed to take part, they were asked to nominate a day and time which would be the most convenient for them. The times they selected were lunch breaks (for example, interviews 3, 5 & 9), before the teaching day had begun (for example, interview 7), after the teaching day had been completed (for example, interviews 1, 2, 4 & 6) and also in moments when the participants were not required to teach (for example, interview 8). Another factor that had to be considered was the interviewer’s availability, as he was not resident in the same city and therefore had to plan travel schedules and hotel accommodation. These times also had to coincide with the researcher’s work commitments. However, all in all, it was possible to limit any inconvenience by combining interviews on a number of days.