The data were collected for one complete semester and mainly in three ways, observations, interviews, and written document, which would be detailed in the following sub-sections respectively.
3.3.1 Observations
To answer the research questions about the common issues and sociopragmatic failures in the communication among team teachers, three types of observations were carried out to understand how team teachers interacted in different contexts. The first type was observation done at the meeting, when the team teachers discussed their teaching or developed new lessons. As the necessity for FETs and LETs to exchange opinions before making decisions during a meeting, this was the most resourceful type of observation. Due to different schools’ administrative concerns, meetings between FETs and LETs could be held from once a week to three times every
semester. The second type was class observation. Most of the discussion among team teachers was to achieve successful team-taught classes. The class observation was to understand how FETs and LETs cooperated with each other for the lesson after their discussion before the class, and also how teachers dealt with unexpected problems together. The third type of observation was random observation. Team teachers also communicated frequently with each other before or after classes, before or after meetings, in the office, or even outside the school. The researcher randomly observed team teachers’ interaction in these contexts in order to gain a comprehensive idea about their communication under as many circumstances as possible. The detailed information of the observations is summarized in Table 3.1.
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Table 3.1
The total number of the three types of observations in the four sites
School Site specificity
As for the ways to collect the data, the researcher took observation notes for all of the meetings and classes, and audio-taped all of the meetings, in which abundant communication took place. The observation notes were finished on the same day the observation was done, and the audio-taped meetings were transcribed as quickly as possible in wake of the meetings.
3.3.2 Interviews
Twenty-three face-to-face interviews were conducted in this study. Among them, there were two types of interviews and they served two different purposes.
The first type of interviews was quasi-formal interview. Interview questions were categorized into three parts in this type of interview as shown in Appendix D. The first part of questions aimed to elicit participants’ background information, including learning background, teaching background, and cross-cultural experiences. Interviews on these topics were to help the researcher better judge how the backgrounds of
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participants may likely influence their communication styles and interpret their opinions concerning their current team teaching work were. The second part of questions investigated the first research question, which is about the common issues team teachers discussed in their interaction. The third part of questions was to directly elicit participants’ reflections on their communication with their co-teachers. However, when and how the topics in these three parts were brought up could be rather flexible depending on the flow of conversation in the interviews. The quasi-formal interviews were held at least once for each participant after the researcher observed a few classes from them.
The second type of interviews was the ethnographic-type interview which was to inquire participants’ comments on their communication breakdown. When the
researcher noted an episode of miscommunication or communication breakdowns, she held an ethnographic-type interview to solicit participants’ comments about the
episode by describing what she had observed or showing them the transcribed data.
Sometimes, if the researcher noticed a piece of communication breakdown but she could not go back to the school to conduct interviews quickly, she would email the participants and confirm what she observed with them through emails. The schedule for the ethnographic-type interview was rather flexible, depending on if any episodes of communication breakdowns occurred.
Interviews with both FETs and LETs were conducted in their mother tongue so that they all expressed themselves without experiencing any language barrier. Only relevant information from quasi-formal interviews was selected for transcription and translation. Whereas content from ethnographic-type interviews was transcribed first and later was translated if the data were in Mandarin Chinese, for the interview data played a key role to triangulate the discourse from observation.
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3.3.2 Written documents
In addition to observations and interviews, documents were collected as supplementary data for the researcher to understand team teaching programs and to triangulate the data retrieved from observations and interviews. The researcher attended FETs training sessions and workshops in four different cities held by team teaching projects organizers to get documents regarding the status quo of those projects and to learn more about the team teaching projects in Taiwan. The researcher also inquired documents like lesson plans or teaching schedules from the participants.
For instance, documents such as email exchanges regarding discussions among team teachers, weekly lesson plans, monthly teaching schedules, and English Village brochures were obtained.