This chapter describes the framework, methods, steps, samples, and data collection employed in this research. It includes the qualitative research used to investigate the language management practices commonly adopted by higher education institutes in Taiwan, and explains the quantitative research process employed to explore the relationship among school strategy towards internationalization, language management practices, and internationalization outcome.
Research Framework
Language management issues are recently brought up owing to the effect of internationalization, not only in business but also in schools. According to the business concepts discussed in literature review, strategies of organization guide the formulation of policies and practices. Literature also showed that language is the first barrier international students confront; hence, this situation leads the researcher to study the relationship between language management and internationalization outcome. Figure 3.1 depicts the framework of this study as follows:
Figure 3.1 Conceptual Framework of this Study
Based on the previous introduction, the propositions are as follows:
Proposition 1: Schools with different strategy type will adopt different language School Strategy
towards Internationalization
Language Management
Practices
Internationalization Outcome
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management practices.
Proposition 2: Language management practices have an impact on schools’
internationalization outcome.
Proposition 3: The more language management practices a school adopts, the better the internationalization outcome of the school is.
Research Method
As shown in the literature review section, few studies discussed language management, especially in school perspectives. This study is exploratory in nature and used both a qualitative and a quantitative approach to explore language management issues in higher education institutes. First, qualitative method was adopted to investigate the language management practices in universities/colleges under the influence of school internationalization using an in-depth interview with semi-structured questions. Second, using a quantitative approach, a survey questionnaire was employed as the tool to collect data on school strategy towards internationalization, language management practices, as well as internationalization outcome of schools, with the purpose of investigating the relationship among these variables.
Research Procedure
The procedure was separated into four main steps (See Table 3.1). The first step was preparation, including the direction of the topic, and literature review. The second and third steps were implementation of qualitative and quantitative studies. In qualitative study, it started from sample selection and interview question design through expert review. Then, interview was conducted to collect the language management practices.
Quantitative study also began from design phase. After expert review, one pilot study of 15 universities/colleges was conducted to make adjustment. Finally, the questionnaire was administered to collect data. In the result section, the data was analyzed and the discussion and conclusions were offered.
Table 3.1
Research Procedure
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Research Sample Qualitative Study
Nine universities/colleges from the 163 in Taiwan with great performance in recruiting international students were focused in the study. There is an assumption that
Table 3.1 Research Procedure
Preparation
Qualitative Study (Stage 1)
cs
Quantitative Study (Stage 2)
Result
Identification of the Topic and Direction
Literature Review and Research Method
Interview Participant Selection
Interview Question Design
Data Analysis Qualitative Data Analysis
Finding Writing of the Thesis Implementation of Interviews
Expert Review
Questionnaire Design
Expert Review and Pilot Test
Distribution of Survey Questionnaire
Data Collection
more international students will force the school to make more efforts on international affairs. Hence, the interviewees are the people working in international affairs related divisions in universities/colleges of great international outcome. The number of international students was employed as the selection criterion. E-mail and telephone were used to invite the members of top 30 universities/colleges with high number of international students. This study eventually included 9 interviewees of international affair division from different universities/colleges with at least one year international affair experience. Table 3.2 shows the profile information of interviewees in this study.
Nicknames were used to assure anonymity of the participants.
Table 3.2
Interviewee Information in Qualitative Study
Interviewee Title International
Affair
Linda Deputy Dean of International Affairs
4 6 / 1875
John Dean of International Affairs 6 7 / 1746
Cathy Director of International Student Center
2 8 / 1371
Alan Dean of International Affairs 5 13 / 764
Vincent Dean of International Affairs 2 15 / 680 Kate Deputy Dean of International
Affairs
2 16 / 531
William Dean of International Affairs 7 22 / 497
Quantitative Study
The quantitative study was intended to include all 163 higher education institutes in Taiwan, consisting of 116 universities, 32 institutes, and 15 colleges. There are 52 national schools, 2 municipal schools, and 109 private schools in the list (Ministry of
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Education, 2012). However, only 146 universities/colleges have international students and not all schools have the international affairs division. For those who do not have international affair division, the questionnaire was delivered to the academic affairs division or the research and development division.
Table 3.3
Demographic Information of Schools in Quantitative Study
Sample Characteristics Frequency Percentage
Type National 36 28.3
Elevate international vision of local students
35 27.6
Increase the number of students 45 35.4 Build international Reputation 31 24.4
Others 6 4.7
Missing Value 10 7.9
Enrollment of
International Students
With International Students 103 81.1
Without International Students 18 14.2
Missing Value 6 4.7
Though this study tried to utilize a census approach to collect data from all universities/colleges of Taiwan, the response rate was unpredictable. This study used several approaches to increase the response rate, including an official cover letter on department letterhead explaining the importance of this study, a gift certificate in the
value of NT$100 as an incentive, and follow-up phone calls. A total of 121 questionnaires were collected. The total response rate is 74.2 percent.
To detect non-response error, this study adopted the procedure suggested by Armstrong and Overton (1977) and compared the responses between early and late respondents based on the assumption that non-respondents are similar to late respondents. Late respondents were defined as those last 41 who returned the survey.
The t-test result showed that the two groups were only significantly different on one response item, c13. Thus, it can be assumed that the responses collected in this research are representative of the target population.
Data Collection Qualitative Study
In qualitative study, an in-depth interview was conducted mainly to investigate the language management practices in schools. The interview was semi-structural utilizing eleven questions to invite them to speak of language management practices.
As discussed in the introduction, language management is a relatively new concept, thus, the general public is not familiar with the term “language management”. Hence, in the interview, the issues of internationalization were utilized to start our conversation. The questions (see Appendix A) were explained respectively in the following paragraphs.
At the beginning, the internationalization strategy and policies are focused by asking these two questions: “What is the degree of internationalization your school involved?” and “Would you please share the internationalization policies that your school has now?” In this part, the language related internationalization practices are
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what the researcher need to explore more on.
After the interviewees openly finish their sharing about internationalization practices, the researcher encouraged them to speak in details on language management practices. First, “What are the language assistances and requirements does your school have from the registration of international/local students to graduation?” and “What are the language assistances and requirements does your school have for other school members except students, such as administrative personnel, professor, and personnel of guidance system?” are the questions utilized to generally talk about LM practices for different school members in sequence.
Furthermore, teaching and curriculum, international academic performance, administrative environment, and language ability requirement, these four dimensions are employed to structurally acquire the completeness of LM management according to the literature by asking the following questions in Table 3.4.
Table 3.4
Interview Questions Categorized by Dimensions
DIMENSION QUESTION
Teaching and Curriculum
— What are the changes of teaching and curriculum because of school internationalization?
International Academic Performance
— What are the plans to develop international academic performance?
(continued)
Table3.4 (continued)
Administrative Support — What administrative assistance do school offer to support international students? How’s the language and accessibility of school website? Do you receive any feedback of administrative assistance and website use? What are they?
— How international is the campus environment of your school?
Language Ability — Under the impact of internationalization, what are the adjustments of language requirement for local
students, professors, and faculties? And what are they?
— Do schools have plans to cultivate language ability of foreign students? Please explain the difference your school provides for English-dominant and
non-English-dominant students.
Finally, the question “Would you please share some internationalization practices successfully implemented at school based on your own experience?” was employed to find out whether language management was recognized as best practices.
Quantitative Study
The two main objectives of quantitative study were to find out the relationship among school strategy towards internationalization and language management practices, and the influence of language management practices on internationalization outcome. The internationalization outcome was measured by the number of international students enrolled in a school, with data retrieved from the MOE, Taiwan.
Data on school strategy and language management practices were collected through a survey questionnaire.
This questionnaire was designed into three parts to fulfill the objectives of the study: strategy identification, implementation of language management practices, and finally the demographic information. In strategy identification, this study utilized the description of the four general strategies in the Miles and Snow typology to help
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research participants identify their school strategy towards internationalization.
McDaniel and Kolari (1987) also employed this method to find out the strategy type of banks. To uncover the current situation on the implementation of language management practices, all language management practices identified from the qualitative study was organized into a list as part of the survey questionnaire (See Appendix C). Participants selected the practices their school has implemented from this list.
However, Miles and Snow’s strategy typology was developed for private organizations and may not be appropriate for educational institutes. This study thus modified McDaniel and Kolari’s (1987) descriptive approach to identify strategy types in educational institutes and further broke Miles and Snow’s strategy typology into 20 Likert-type questions to prevent the difficulty for schools to subjectively select its strategy. Since these strategy questions were developed by this study, factor analysis was conducted to explore the factor structure of these questions. This study used principle component analysis with varimax rotation in factor analysis. Factors with eigenvalue larger than 1 were extracted.
The 20 descriptive questions of strategy were grouped into four categories after factor analysis procedure (See Table 3.5). The total variance explained by the four factors was 67.86%. Questions were deleted when their factor loading fell below 0.5 or when cross loaded on other factors. Therefore, questions s2, s12, and s15 were deleted.
Table 3.5
Factor Analysis of Internationalization Strategy Questions
Strategy
Question Factor Loading
S1 S2 S3 S4
S1-Reactor
s19: My school is not willing to spend extra cost to undertake the uncertain risk.
.796 -.061 .156 -.137 s20: Only when the overall environment is over
pressured, my school will adopt fundamental internationalization practices.
.792 .049 -.019 .058
s17: The school does not have consistent internationalization policy and target market.
.702 -.231 .306 -.183 s18: My school is relatively not proactive in coping with
internationalization.
.692 -.381 .185 -.254 s12: My school usually ignores indirectly related overall
internationalization environment.
.412 -.233 .389 -.009
S2-Prospector
s3: My school emphasizes on the market signs and checks the opportunities in the environment regularly.
-.162 .803 -.027 .070 s1: My school focuses on the extensive market and
target on the way to progress internationalization process.
.142 .765 .045 .206
s4: My school would evaluate regularly the
appropriateness of internationalization services and strategy, and make the following action plan by the opportunities.
-.333 .751 -.131 .108
s5: My school usually adopted more innovative internationalization practices than other schools.
-.530 .565 -.239 -.033 s13: On one hand, my school implements the existed
effective internationalization policy and services; on the other hand, my school observes closely the competitors in the market, and adopts those policies that are possibly with good potential.
-.290 .541 -.171 .324
s6: My school aims to become the leader of every internationalization practices.
-.443 .508 -.323 .117 (continued)
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Table 3.5 (continued)
The language management practices were collected from in-depth interview in this study. Since there were many items of language management practices, factor analysis was applied to reduce the number of dimensions for further inferential statistical analysis. As seen in Table 3.6, the first group of language management practices is language ability of school members. This group is categorized into six dimensions. The total variance explained by the six factors was 69.08%. Questions e9 and e20 with loading lower than 0.5 were deleted. The other group of language management practices is language environment building. It is divided into four dimensions after deleting seven questions (c8, c12, c13, c17, c21, c22, c23) using the criteria consistent with the previous procedure. The total variance explained by the S3-Analyzer (Stable Approach)
s7: My school does not seek to become extensive leader in the process of internationalization.
.153 -.194 .737 .074 s9: My school focuses on mature and stable
internationalization policy, and rarely adjusts with the environment changes.
.170 -.078 .713 -.181
s14: The internationalization strategy in my school emphasizes efficiency and effectiveness, and inclined to take the uncertainty.
.109 .356 .558 .164
S4-Defender (Target Market)
s8: My school focuses on specific region, market and target on the way to internationalization.
.014 .030 .040 .783 s11: My school is adept in maintaining certain target
market.
-.360 .217 .027 .706 s10: My school is very familiar with the
internationalization operation in certain market, and provides good quality services to target market.
-.492 .298 -.053 .530
s16: My school is good at setting up formal structure and process, such as policies and standard operation procedures, to perform efficient routine services.
.117 .274 -.470 .503
four factors was 71.27%
Table 3.6
Factor Analysis of Language Management Practices (Language Ability) Language Management Practices (Language Ability)
Question Factor Loading
E1 E2 E3 E4 E5 E6
E1- Language Training Center e1: Establish language training center (e.g. Mandarin Chinese center)
.817 .182 .066 .131 .007 .268 e2: Design Mandarin Chinese training
courses for international students.
.798 .300 .124 .220 .070 .123 e3: Design English training courses. .619 .285 .137 .094 .352 .153 e10: Establish language training unit (e.g.
learning center for language or language assessment center)
.601 .009 .445 .203 .117 .060
E2- Language Ability Policy for Foreign Students e4: Set English as the criteria for
application of international students.
.315 .769 .140 -.005 .159 .146 e5: Set Mandarin Chinese as the criteria
for application of international students.
.305 .720 .029 .142 .029 .275 e13: Set English as the criteria for
application of local students.
-.105 .707 .182 .423 .009 .127 e7: Set Mandarin Chinese as graduation
criteria of international students.
.210 .561 -.047 .148 .231 .394 E3- Language Ability Policy for Local Students
e16: Design English make-up teaching courses for local students.
-.056 .169 .819 .235 .076 .000 e15: Classes divided by different
language proficiency for local students.
.133 .100 .778 .086 .108 .136 e14: List English as common required
course for local students.
.195 -.107 .710 .098 .007 .188 e17: Set English as graduation criteria for
local students.
.244 .318 .615 .203 .280 -.030 E4- Language Ability Service for Local Students
e19: Design and implement after-class language learning activity for local students (e.g. English day).
.111 .027 .178 .783 .036 .218
e11: Design other language training course besides English training courses.
.350 .264 .170 .632 .022 -.085 (continued)
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Language Management Practices (Language Ability) Table 3.6 (continued)
e12: Design English training courses for local students. (e.g. English program or English on-line learning)
.064 .293 .203 .626 .137 .045
E5- Language Incentives
e8: Establish language incentive practices for international students.(e.g.
reimbursement for language test and incentive programs for language certification)
.096 .064 .038 .012 .885 .135
e6: Set English as graduation criteria for international students.
.264 .380 .202 .091 .712 -.108 e18: Establish language incentive
practices for local students. (e.g.
reimbursement for language test and incentive programs for language certification)
-.371 -.054 .381 .268 .576 .157
E6- Language Learning for Faculty Members e23: Establish language incentive
practices for faculty members (e.g.
reimbursement for language test and incentive programs for language certification)
.087 .146 .146 .008 .128 .829
e22: Design English training course to increase the language ability of local professors and other faculty members.
.199 .356 .194 .208 -.032 .731
e21: Design Mandarin Chinese training courses to elevate Chinese ability of professors from other countries.
.281 .481 .041 .186 .155 .558
Table 3.7
Factor Analysis of Language Management Practices (Language Environment) Language Management Practices (Language Environment)
Question C1 C2 C3 C4
C1-Indirect Language Environment
c10: Set administrative personnel basic language requirement.
.793 .076 .408 .079 c6: Adopt bilingual content in Academic Affair
(registration and course selection) system.
.779 .330 .030 .227 c11: Set basic language requirement for school guidance
system. (e.g. military instructor, guidance Officer, nurse)
.770 .086 .354 .014 c7: Adopt bilingual content in on-line learning system .743 .412 -.003 .233 c2: Adopt bilingual content in regulations .666 .217 .327 .307 c9: Provide professors from other countries guideline
and manual.
.569 .165 .035 .451 C2- Courses Conducted in English
c20: Set up courses taught in English. .131 .865 .249 .165
c19: Set up English programs. .377 .795 .118 .142
c18: Recruit local professors that can teach in English. .205 .768 .382 .167 C3- Faculty Language Ability
c14: Recruit administrative staff with relatively good language ability.
.263 .155 .844 .147 c15: Recruit part-time workers with excellent language
ability
.125 .315 .794 .176 c16: Recruit foreign professors with Chinese Mandarin
ability
.196 .334 .617 .298 C4- Direct Language Environment
c3: Adopt bilingual/ multi-lingual content in school website
.094 .152 .143 .798 c4: Adopt bilingual content in campus signs. .096 .141 .102 .777 c5: Adopt bilingual content in campus information (e.g.
poster, electronic newspaper in campus, internal activities information and traffic information)
.339 .167 .260 .663
c1: Adopt bilingual content in forms and document. .437 -.034 .436 .537 In conclusion, school strategy towards internationalization is divided into four types as shown in the literature (prospector, reactor, analyzer and defender). A five-point Likert type scale (1 represents strongly disagree and 5 represents strongly agree) was used for respondents to rate how their school do on these strategy items.
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Ratings were aggregated for each strategy type. For each school, the highest-scored strategy type was identified as the school’s strategy. For example, if a school scored the highest on the prospector strategy items, this school will be identified as a
prospector. Except the correlation analysis, which used the mean of original rating of each strategy type, school strategy was treated as a categorical variable. When a school has more than one highest-scored strategy type, this school was identified as having multiple strategies, a fifth category in data coding. LM practices of language ability among school members are categorized into six dimensions, which are defined as E1 to E6. The detail information of each dimension is shown in Table 3.6. LM practices of language environment in campus are divided into four dimensions (C1 to C4). Table 3.7 reports category information in details. Respondents were asked to rate their schools on these items using a five-point Likert type scale representing the level of implementation of each practice in their schools.
Data Analysis Procedures Qualitative
The procedure for the qualitative study was first the preparation of raw data files, which included the researcher’s record and verbatim text. After careful reading, the researcher coded the text content into different categories and further reviewed the overlapping coding and uncoded text. The coding process went through continuous revision and refinement until a valid category system is achieved. (Thomas, 2006).
The ultimate outcome of this stage was a list of language management practices currently in use by higher education institutes.
Quantitative
SPSS version 19 was employed to conduct statistical analysis in quantitative study. Descriptive statistics was used to show the general distribution of the school
demographics and major research variables. Cross tabulation was used to show inter-relations between school internationalization strategy and language management practices. Regression analysis was conducted to test the propositions regarding relationships between language management practices and internationalization outcome.
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