The Second Taiwanese Pilot Study

The objective of this section is to discuss the management of the second Taiwanese pilot study. The focus will be on the relevant changes made, based on the findings and feedbacks of the first pilot study, in order to construct a more reliable methodological design of the research questionnaire for the main study. 3.2.2.1 The Administration

The online format of the second pilot study questionnaire has enabled the researcher to recruit respondents beyond the geographical scope of Glasgow. The preliminary version of the online survey was emailed to ten Taiwanese acquaintances of the researcher (male=2, female=8) on the 1st of March 2013, and ten completed online surveys were received by the 14th _{of March 2013. The}

respondents of the second pilot study age from 22 to 43 (mean age was 28). The language of the online questionnaire for the second Taiwanese pilot study is in standard Mandarin. The pilot respondents were invited and encouraged to give any comments regarding the content and the administration of the online survey. There was no major issue raised by the respondents and the general feedback on the online survey was positive.

3.2.2.2 Modifications Made

According to the lessons learned from the first pilot study (Section 3.2.1), the following changes have been made in the second Taiwanese pilot research questionnaire17_.

1. In order to recruit a large number of respondents in an efficient manner, the second pilot study administered the research questionnaire via the online format, which has been employed in previous language attitude studies (e.g., Coupland and Bishop, 2007; Bauman, 2013; Litzenberg, 2013; Kraut and Wulff, 2013; Sasayama, 2013).

2. The respondents of the second pilot study were asked to evaluate seven different recorded varieties of American English (AE), General American

17The Second Taiwanese Pilot Research Questionnaire is the same as the Taiwanese Main

Research Questionnaire in Appendix A: it is not re-listed in the Appendices section to avoid repetition.

English (GAE), Standard Southern British English (SSBE), Indian English (IE), Japanese English (JE), Spanish English (SE) and Taiwanese English (TE), according to the criteria discussed in section 3.3.2.3. Except for the speech sample of SSBE and IE that were recorded in the phonetic laboratory of the University of Glasgow, the other recordings are chosen from the SAA.

3. The observation and the feedback indicated that the majority of the first pilot respondents were unfamiliar with the procedure of how to evaluate speakers of each English variety across the personality traits in the bi- polar semantic differential scale. An extra guise with a female speaker of Southern British English speech is used as an “introduction example” to help the informants familiarise themselves with the process of completing the task of the VGT.

4. The six-point semantic differential scale of the second pilot study is composed of “confident”, “intelligent”, “educated”, “authoritative”, “friendly” and “lively” and their opposites (1 is the most unfavourable evaluation, while 6 is the most favourable evaluation).

5. According to the comments from the first pilot study (Section 3.2.1), participants of the second pilot study are given a pre-determined list of choices instead of a pre-designed map when answering the speaker origin identification task. The respective countries of the seven English varieties selected for the VGT are on the list along with three other options, which are “Russia”, “South Africa” and “not-known”.

6. The number of questions for the Likert Scale is reduced to seven in the second pilot study. In addition, to avoid the participants’ inclination to respond in the middle of the scale, the numbering of the Likert scale has been changed to six (while 1=Total Disagreement; 6=Total Agreement). 7. Two more multiple-choice questions have been added in the second pilot

study questionnaire. The modified list of choices for the second pilot study is composed of the seven English varieties chosen for evaluation in

the VGT (i.e., AE, GAE, SSBE, IE, JE, SE and TE), “no preference” and “others”.

8. The Background Information section is moved to the beginning of the second pilot study (see Appendix A and C). Additionally, the identification of the origin of speakers is incorporated into the same section as the VGT in the second pilot study (see Appendix A and C). That is, respondents are requested to identify each guise’s origin immediately after they rate each speech sample on the bipolar scale of VGT.

3.2.2.3 The Points to be Retained

From the second pilot study of the Taiwanese research questionnaire, the following points were found to be appropriate for the main study.

1. The online format of the questionnaire is a productive tool in recruiting potential respondents efficiently, and thus a website was built for the research questionnaire of the main study.

2. Since the main study was operating the questionnaire online, the wordings of the instructions, the questions and the content of each section were found to be of great clarity and comprehensibility even without verbal explanation.

3. The listening recordings were found to be of authenticity and validity to exemplify the target English varieties of AE, GAE, SSBE, IE, JE, SE and TE chosen for evaluations.

4. The Taiwanese respondents of the second pilot study acknowledged that the six personality traits (i.e., “confident”, “intelligent”, “educated”, “authoritative”, “friendly” and “lively”) used in the bi-polar scale were culturally and socially salient for the judges to evaluate different English speech in the VGT (see Section 3.3.2.5).

5. The pre-determined choices list of the speaker origin identification task was found to be of a more appropriate design for the respondents, and thus the main study employed the same methodology.

6. The number of questions in each section of the second pilot questionnaire was found to be appropriate and therefore the same set of questions was retained to minimise the potential effect of listener fatigue in the main study (e.g., Dornyei, 2003; Sykes, 2010).

7. Structuring the second pilot questionnaire according a sequential progression from the more indirect to the more direct means of eliciting participants’ attitudes was practical. Consequently, the structure of the research questionnaire of the main study was in the following order: background information; VGT and speaker origin identification task; Likert scale questions; multiple-choice questions (see Section 3.3 for the detailed description of the main research questionnaire).