Selecting Location and Participants

The nature of the writing and feedback in specific taught Master’s courses was a key factor in locating the first study, based partly on personal contacts within the

department of Archaeology. As a tutor on the MATESOL programme at Bradfield, I was aware that documented essays were a key requirement in that programme, and that relatively detailed feedback was provided at four points over the year.

Interviewing tutors for each piece of feedback to student participants also required cooperation from more tutors than in the first study, and I decided that my contacts with colleagues in the Department of Education would be a key to ensuring such collaboration.

A challenge faced by researchers carrying out longitudinal studies is that of maintaining collaboration of participants over the data collection period. Only three participants volunteered for the preliminary study, and I was fortunate that they did not wish to withdraw at any point. The fact that there were 79 potential participants in the MATESOL cohort in 2009 also influenced my decision to recruit from that programme. I opted to recruit eight students, with the knowledge that participants could withdraw at any stage for many reasons. Only one of three participants in the preliminary study had completed a pre-sessional course prior to the taught

programme, so I decided that the second study could provide further insights into the impact of pre-sessional programmes by including more participants with this

background. Recruiting half of these participants with pre-sessional backgrounds allowed me to add a separate research question to those stated in Chapter 2.

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RQ: Does attendance on a pre-sessional programme impact noticeably on students’ use of feedback and development of CAW? If there is a noticeable impact, how and why does this occur?

The procedure for data collection in the main study is outlined in Table 6.2 below. To ensure anonymity of tutors, I used the feminine gender as in the first study for reporting results and interview extracts. An additional issue to address here was the nature of my ‘insider’ position in the department of Education, but in this case I felt it was important not to anonymise any data relating to my own feedback.

Table 6:2 Main study data collection procedures

Main study Dates Participants Activity

Gaining consent October 2009 Term 1:Week 0 Students on MATESOL programme in Dept. Education

Presentation and invitation to participate; e-mail follow up for volunteers; letter detailing study.

Baseline interviews Term 1 weeks 2-3 8 student volunteers for study -4 pre-sessional -4 non pre-sessional

Establish prior experience and biographical details

Establish prior experience and perspectives on role of feedback and L2 writing issues.

Formative interviews Term 1 weeks 7-8 7 tutors 8 students

Establish student engagement/ understanding of feedback. Summative interviews Term 2 week 5 Term 3 week 6 7 tutors 8 students 3 tutors 7 students

Establish student engagement/ understanding of feedback Reflection on taught experience of feedback on writing in taught programme. Member checks January 2011 March 2012 Student: Betty Tutor D

Interviews around participants’ data and my conclusions.

Table 6.2 shows that one fewer student was interviewed in the later stages, as Helen unfortunately withdrew during the second term due to illness. However, data collected on her first formative and summative feedback, and data on her experience on the pre-sessional is also reported and analysed here. A further problem occurred in obtaining formative feedback for one of the eight students33 in term one. Because

33 _{The relevant electronic file attachment was not available at the time of data collection, and a long} delay before analysis meant that the file was not discovered missing until more than a year later. At this point the tutor’s file had been deleted and the student could not be approached, as she had left the country.

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of the importance of the formative feedback in tracing the impact of feedback over the taught programme, I decided to exclude this student’s data from the final case studies and thematic analysis. The notion of ‘saturation’ of data is also applicable here, given that the final six cases presented many similar findings. The final chapter, therefore, presents case studies and thematic analysis for six of the original eight participants, with Helen’s data included in a consideration of pre-sessional impact. In total, data from twenty seven student interviews and seventeen tutor interviews were considered in the final analysis.

As I led, taught and marked assignments on the second-term core module for the MATESOL, it would have been very difficult to exclude my own feedback from the main study. Rejecting student volunteers from my first term module group could also have reduced the potential number of participants. Section 3.2 discusses the value of practitioner research, and although I rejected the Action Research or Exploratory Practice models for my design, I also recognised their value. It also seemed appropriate to submit my own feedback practices to scrutiny along with my

colleagues, and the principle of transparency was clearly important (see discussion of honesty and openness, Section 4.2.4). I believed that an exploration of my own feedback practices was justifiable, provided that I made my own data clear at every stage, and did not attempt to present it anonymously. To aid this process, I co-opted a colleague (referred to in quotes in Chapter 7 as I = Interviewer) to carry out interviews with my students when discussing their feedback, and also used the same colleague to interview me concerning these students’ formative and summative feedback. This may seem rather artificially contrived, but it allowed me to present my own position in response to my own interview schedules, providing data that I could then compare and contrast with that from other tutor interviews. My

interpretations of the feedback process were informed by my own practice, so exploring that practice was important in making visible the way that I arrived at my conclusions.

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Table 6:3 MATESOL students’ background information

Name Age Nationality IELTS test scores Undergraduate degree Vocational work experience Pre- sessional

Anna 22 Chinese Overall 7.0

R-7.5 L-8.5 W-6.0 S-6.0 English 6-week teaching practice in degree/ private tutoring high school No

Betty 22 Chinese Overall 6.5

R-7.0 L-6.5 W-7.0 S-5.5 Business English N 8-week

Clara 23 Chinese Overall 6.5

R-6.0 L-7.5 W-5.5 S-7.0 Biotechnology 2 years Teaching English in Kindergarten 12 -week

Diane 22 Chinese Overall 7.0

R-7.0 L-8.5 W-6 S-6 English 40 hrs informal teaching English to children No

Ethel 24 Chinese Overall 6.5

R-7.0 L-6.5 W-6 S-6

English home tutoring /private lessons 1 adult and 2 children

No

Flora 25 Chinese Overall 6.0

R-5.5 L-6 W-7 S-6

English N 8-week

Helen 30 Chinese Overall 6.0

R-7.0 L-5.5 W-5.5 S-6

Biology 2 years teaching Biology at tertiary level China

12-week

As in the preliminary study, I made a short presentation to outline my

research at the end of a preliminary meeting with the 79 MATESOL students in their first week of term, and invited students to contact me by e-mail if they were

interested in collaborating with me. All the students who replied were Chinese females, so I responded to the replies as they arrived, ensuring only that I had an

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equal number of students with and without pre-sessional experience. Given that all participants in the second study were of the same nationality, it was not seen to be necessary to disguise this in the way that I had done in the preliminary study where each participant would have been identifiable if nationality had been stated. I then followed up with an e-mail reply, attaching a letter describing the study in more detail and arranging short baseline interviews in the second and third weeks of term. Students signed the letters of consent during these interviews, which were longer for pre-sessional students, as I asked them to reflect on their perception of the pre- sessional in terms of: development of language, awareness of academic culture and experience of academic writing and feedback.