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CHAPTER THREE METHODOLOGY
This chapter delineates the overall research design that this study employed to investigate EFL undergraduates’ Internet reading habits and perceptions. It introduces the main research method adopted in this study, reports how the participants were recruited, illustrates the pilot study, describes how the data were collected, and how the data were analyzed respectively as follows.
Rationale for Research Method
The choice of the research method depended on the purposes and research questions of the present study. Different from previous relevant studies conducted using surveys and questionnaires to quantitatively investigate learners’ Internet reading habits and perceptions, the overall research design of the current study was grounded on and conducted by means of focus group interviews to probe the informants’ Internet reading habits and perceptions in detail and in depth. The
following presents the introduction to focus group interview in terms of its definition, rationales of application, and advantages to justify the research method utilized in this study.
Focus group interview, coined and defined by Merton and Kendall (1946), is an exploratory and qualitative research method administered to apply to a situation where participants have a specific experience of or opinion about the topic under investigation. They further propose that within focus group interview, “an explicit interview guide is implemented, subjective experiences of participants are explored in relation to predetermined to research questions (cited in Gibbs, 1997). Kreuger (1988) briefly defines a focus group interview as a “carefully planned discussion designed to obtain perceptions in a defined area of interest in a permissive, non-threatening environment” (cited in Lewis, 1995, 2000, p.2). In this respect, focus group interview
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is an interview conducted by gathering a group of targeted participants to have a face-to-face and interactive discussion on specific research topics under the guidance of trained interviewers.
As for the rationale and purpose of applying focus group interview research, Gibbs (1997) stated that this research method is mainly adopted to tap into
respondents’ attitudes, feelings, beliefs, experiences, and reactions in a natural way.
Gibbs further cites Stewart and Shamdasani’s (1990) viewpoints on the main purposes of this research method. They enumerate focus group interview is used to
obtain general background information about a topic of interest;
generate research hypotheses that can be submitted to further research and test using more quantitative approaches;
stimulate new ideas and creative concepts;
diagnose the potential for problems with a new program, service or product;
generate impressions of products, programs, services, institutions, or other objects of interest;
learn how respondents talk about the phenomenon of interest which may facilitate quantitative research tools;
interpret previously obtained qualitative results (cited in Lewis, 1995, 2000, p.3).
In respect of the benefits that focus group interview brings to the research, Kitzinger (1995) believes that it is “the attribute of interaction and group dynamics within the focus group interview that enables the participants to use their own language to comfortably reveal their views of the target issues, to discuss and ask questions of each other, and to reconsider their own understandings of their specific experiences”. In addition, Morgan (1988) points that a focus group interview allows researchers to discover what issue is salient crucial and why it is salient (cited in
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Gibbs, 1997).
All in all, seeing that the rationales and advantages of conducting a focus group interview are quite correspondent to the purposes of this study---to do an exploratory investigation on the undergraduates’ habits and perceptions of reading English on the Internet, the focus group interview method was accordingly utilized to benefit the researcher in probing for clarification, soliciting greater details, and gaining multiple interpretations and insights into each participant’s responses under the pressure-free interview environments.
Participants and Rationale for Participant Recruitment Rationale for Participant Recruitment
The participant selection of this study is justified by the following three criteria.
First of all, since this study intends to investigate and then compare English major freshmen’s and seniors’ Internet reading habits and perceptions, the participants recruited in this study consist of English major freshmen and seniors. Secondly, in the hope of contributing a variety of findings, the researcher drew participants from two universities. Therefore, more well-rounded and diverse results can be expected.
Thirdly, some qualitative researchers have recommended that when the researchers know relatively little about a phenomenon, investigating a small number of
participants to provide rich information and a more focused analysis is more likely to provide clearer directions to the research question (Altun, 2000; Coiro & Dobler, 2007). With this regard, the number of participants of the two education level, seniors and freshmen, from the two universities were appropriately limited.
Participants
The participants recruited to this study comprised 49 undergraduate volunteers.
With the convenience of sample, the participants were selected in part or in whole at
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the convenience of the researcher of the current study. Moreover, in order to obtain a diversity of findings, this study intended to recruit the participants from two
universities that the researcher had an access to. In so doing, the findings from the interview data would not be too confined to the participants recruited from one school.
As a result, there were 25 participants drawn from one of a top-ranking universities in northern part of Taiwan (hereafter, university A) and 24 participants from one of a top-ranking private universities in northern part of Taiwan (hereafter, university B).
In addition, in order to answer the third research question---what are the differences between freshmen and seniors in their habits and perceptions of reading English on the Internet---the participants were also enrolled based on their education levels. The English major freshmen, who lacked experiences of using English as their medium to search for information on the Internet during their studies at high school, were assumed to be novice at reading English on the Internet. However, the English major seniors, who had three more years of academic English learning experiences, were assumed to be more skilled at utilizing English as medium to search for information in English. By comparing the seniors’ and freshmen’s habits and perceptions of reading English on the Internet, it is hoped that the huge differences can be discovered in order to come up with more pedagogical suggestions for educators to well prepare the freshmen with more skills to cope with the complexity of reading English on the Internet.
All participants were recruited by the researchers’ personal invitation with the distributions of the Chinese version of consent form (See Appendix B for Chinese version and English translation version in Appendix A) on partaking in this research.
Before the researchers’ recruitment, the researcher contacted some professors of the English department from both of the universities in order to gain their permissions to recruit participants. Having gained the permissions from several professors, the
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researcher immediately embarked on making arrangements for paying around eight visits to both universities to respectively draw volunteer participants from seniors and freshmen of university A and seniors and freshmen of university B.
To be more concrete and clear, the participants came from seven classes in total.
The senior participants from university A were recruited from the course of Consecutive and Simultaneous Interpretation while the senior participants from university B were recruited from the course of Business English and Advanced
English. In addition, the freshmen participants from university A were drawn from the course of English Listening and Oral Training and English Writing while the
freshmen from university B were drawn from the course of English Listening and Oral Training in two different classes.
During the researcher’s personal invitation in their class time, the Chinese version of the consent forms was distributed to recruit the voluntary participants to form several cohorts of focus group interview sessions. In the consent form, the purpose and research method of this study were at first introduced. Aside from this, as Gibbs (1997) mentions, some incentives are necessary to recruit enough participants.
With this respect, each voluntary participant was told to offer one hundred dollars for one-hour focus group interview to get more participants involved in this study.
Preceding their decision making, they were assured that it was alright if they were unwilling to participate in this study. Besides, they were also encouraged to group themselves. Thereby, it would be so much easier for the researcher in arranging the focus groups and scheduling the interviews. Moreover, the confidentiality of their interview details was also guaranteed. Finally, if the students were willing to take part in this study, they were required to leave their contact information, including e-mail addresses or phone numbers, through which the researcher could further schedule focus group interview sessions. After several recruitments, the researcher divided the
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willing participants into several groups and then made appointments with each one of them.
The background of the participants is described as follows. 49 participants were all English majors. Although they came from different universities and different education levels, they shared the similar required English courses, such as the introduction to western literature, approaches to literature, English writing, and English oral and listening training. Moreover, the native language of all the
participants is Mandarin Chinese with two exceptions from Malaysia. Even though these two overseas compatriots from Malaysia where English is the official and second language, they reported they are very able to read in Chinese. They claimed that they are similar to other Chinese students because they would also like to read in Chinese. Therefore, the data they provided did not impede the analysis of this study.
Data Collection Procedures
To obtain data, this study was mainly conducted by means of focus group interviews with interview questions that were overall audio-recorded with a recorder.
The following first elaborates on the arrangement of focus group interviews, followed by the procedures of audio-recorded focus group interviews, the design of interview questions, a pilot study, and finally an overall picture of the procedures of data collection.
Arrangement of Focus Group Interview
Following the recruitment, the researchers started to make arrangements of the focus group interview by initially grouping the participants and then scheduling the interview time with them. Concerning the method to group the participants, the participants were mainly organized based on their education level (i.e. seniors or freshmen), the number of the participants included in a group, their available time left
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on the consent form, and the group they had already made and listed on the consent form.
To be specific, the participants at first had to be grouped with the same education level on the premise so that the interview data could be more likely to present the differences of Internet English reading habits and perceptions between the two different education level groups. Furthermore, according to Krueger (1988), to appropriately group the participants, a group of four to six participants is suggested for better discussion over an issue. After meeting the two criteria mentioned above, the researcher further assembled the participants based on the group they made themselves. And for those who had no group, the researcher randomly assigned them in a group based on their same available time. Eventually, the total number of the participants is 49 with 18 focus group interviews consisting of eight groups of freshmen and 10 groups of seniors. However, due to the difficult time arrangement and the participants’ unexpected absence, the number of the participants varied.
As for the interview location and date, the researcher and the participants made an appointment on when and where to meet up to have an interview by either phone or through e-mail. During the scheduling time and place, the researcher promised the participants to have interviews at their convenience. Therefore, all the interviews were conducted on or nearby campus. By so doing, the participants did not have to worry about the inconvenience that this interview participation might cause. The place where the interviews were conducted was various, encompassing the coffee shop, available classroom, and school cafeteria.
Concerning the interview duration, the total time spent on the 18 interviews is 613 minutes (around 10.22 hours) while the average time of the interview
approximates 34 minutes. In addition, the range of the focus group interview is from 25~49 minutes. Table 3-1 illustrates the composition of the focus groups and the
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interview schedules in detail.
Table 3-1 Focus Group Interview Schedule
Education Level Interview Date Time Number of Participants
Group Number
Seniors at school A 2008/03/25 49 minutes 3 Group 1
Seniors at school A 2008/03/26 36 minutes 1* Group 2
Seniors at school A 2008/03/28 39 minutes 2 Group 3
Seniors at school A 2008/03/28 37 minutes 2 Group 4
Seniors at school A 2008/03/28 43 minutes 3 Group 5
Seniors at school A 2008/04/02 30 minutes 2 Group 6
Seniors at school B 2008/04/21 30 minutes 3 Group 7 Freshmen at school A 2008/04/24 37 minutes 3 Group 8 Freshmen at school A 2008/04/24 43 minutes 3 Group 9
Seniors at school B 2008/04/25 32 minutes 3 Group 10
Seniors at school B 2008/04/30 30 minutes 4 Group 11
Seniors at school B 2008/04/30 30 minutes 2 Group 12
Freshmen at school B 2008/05/16 27 minutes 4 Group 13
Freshmen at school B 2008/05/16 25 minutes 2 Group 14
Freshmen at school B 2008/05/16 25 minutes 3 Group 15
Freshmen at school B 2008/05/28 30 minutes 3 Group 16
Freshmen at school A 2008/05/30 32 minutes 3 Group 17
Freshmen at school A 2008/06/02 38 minutes 3 Group 18
TOTAL 12 days 613 minutes 49
(10.22 hours) 18 groups
Note. The number of the participants highlighted with an asterisk * in group 2 is one. In fact, there were supposed to two participants included in this group. Unfortunately, one of the participants failed to attend the interview because she suddenly had an emergent personal business to deal with. Therefore, there was only one participant. Although this seems to fail the standard of the participant recruitment of a focus group interview, the interview data that the rest of the participants provided are quite saturated and rich.
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Procedures of Audio-recorded Focus Group Interviews
Prior to the interview, the interviewed groups were notified that the interview was going to be recorded with an MP3 to help the researcher to keep track of their responses and interactions for further research analysis. Moreover, since the type of the interview conducted in this study is semi-structured, which is informal and flexible and allows new questions to be brought up during the interview, the
participants were strongly encouraged to feel comfortable to share whatever that came into their mind and that actually there were no fixed or exact answers to each
interview questions. Therefore, they could feel free to share opinion under pressure-free atmosphere.
During the interview of this study, the researcher asked the participants the questions in order of the ten previously designed interview questions (See Table 3-3).
The discussion on each interview question did not end until the participants had no single opinion to share. However, if there was still any idea flashing into their mind in the middle of the discussion on another asked interview question, they were always welcome to point it out. In addition, if an opinion the participants provided was not specific enough to the researcher, the researcher would ask the interviewees to illustrate it with some personal experiences or to elaborate on it. If the respondents’
discussion was off topic, the researcher still let them finish their discussion first, and then used another way to specify and illustrate the interview question again. This way, the participants could discuss the issue the researcher pointed out on the right track.
Along with the interview, the researcher caught the main themes of their discussions and jotted them down as references for interview transcription in verbatim and data analysis.
Following the focus group interview, the participants were given one hundred dollars for their participation in this study as the researcher had promised to grant
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them for appreciation for their cooperation. At last, the researcher inquired the
participants’ willingness for the researcher to contact them either by phone or through email in order to ask them to shed light on some blurry statements recorded.
Interview Questions
Four considerations were taken into while the researcher designed the interview questions. Firstly, the interview questions were developed in English (See Appendix C) and then translated and delivered in Chinese (See Appendix D). The reason to do so is to have the participants better understand the interview questions since their mother tongue is Chinese and to have the researcher present this study in English. By using Chinese to deliver the interview questions, the participants’ discomfort listening to English or using English to respond can be diminished and thus their
understandings of inquiry questions are further boosted. Seeing this, each of focus group interviews of this study was conducted in Chinese so as to elicit more insights from the pressure-free respondents, who were not anxious about which English words or sentence patterns to use during the interviews. Instead, with the use of Chinese, more thoughts and expressions were articulated.
Secondly, corresponding to Stewart and Shamdasani’s (1990) suggestion that for the participants to respond from various dimensions, a dozen questions is the
maximum and they should be open-ended and unstructured (cited in Lewis, 1995, 2000, p.4). In this respect, the researcher designed a ten-open-ended-question interview guide. Ten interview questions, based on both the research questions and the literature, embraced two issues: the first issue is about online English reading habits with six sub-questions, and the second issue is about online English reading perceptions with five sub-questions. The overall interview questions are enumerated in Table 3-2.
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Table 3-2 Ten Interview Questions for Focus Group Interview Interview Questions
Issue 1: Online English Reading Habits
1. When and why do you like to read English materials on the Internet?
2. What types of Internet English reading materials do you like to read, such as English news? Why do you read them?
3. What topics of Internet English reading materials are you interested in reading, such as subject-related information? Why do you like these topics?
4. How often do you read English materials on the Internet on a weekly basis?
5. What influences your choices of Internet English reading materials? For example, the length and the presentation of the Internet content.
6. If you encounter some problems affecting your comprehension during the Internet reading, such as new vocabulary, what are some typical ways to solve these problems?
Issue 2: Online English Reading Perceptions
7. What do you think are the challenges and disadvantages of reading English on the Internet?
8. What do you think the advantages of reading English on the Internet?
9. Do you prefer reading English materials on the Internet to printed ones? Why?
10. If your English teacher is going to integrate the Internet English reading into the course, what are some suggestions would you like to make? Why?
Thirdly, to assure the validity of the interview questions, ten interview questions were revised with the following procedures. First of all, the researcher generated questions according to the research purposes. Afterwards, the question that had problems were selected by the thesis advisor and then discussed and revised by the
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thesis advisor and the researcher in order to conduct a pilot study. Then, a pilot study (the details presented in the following section) was conducted to examine whether the
thesis advisor and the researcher in order to conduct a pilot study. Then, a pilot study (the details presented in the following section) was conducted to examine whether the