To directly evaluate the participant’s progress in oral communicative competence and to probe her general impression of the songs and chants instruction, three
one-on-one semi-structured interviews were employed for different purposes. The first interview was employed at the beginning of the first semester to select the participant of this study; the second interview was served at the end of the first semester to see if there was any effect on the participant’s oral communicative competence and her attitudes toward English communication through songs and chants instruction. The last interview was conducted at the beginning of the second semester to see how the effects on the participant retained after the winter vacation.
The processes of three interviews were tape-recorded and transcribed for further analysis.
In order to obtain background information of the observed class and select the participant of the study, the first interview comprised two parts (see Appendix 4). The first part was an oral interview conducted in English to evaluate the oral
communicative competence of students in the observed class. McKay (2006) suggested that the oral interview was typically on a one-on-one basis; that is, the teacher talked with one child at a time. Such face-to-face oral tasks might not guarantee equal standardization as that in tape-mediated tasks, they were more like
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natural communication in which speakers reciprocate each other in turn-taking (Luoma, 2004). Since face-to-face oral interviews might cause young learners’
anxiety in oral performance, a familiar adult with the use of real objects or pictures was more likely to make the oral interview more effective (McKay, 2006). In order to lower students’ anxiety, the first interview was conducted in the second week of the semester before the formal instruction of songs and chants began. By the time, the students were getting familiar with the teacher, who was also the researcher. A script with planned patterns of questions was prepared to ensure the consistency in standards among various learners.
The second part of the semi-structured interview was conducted in Mandarin Chinese. A series of questions written in Chinese were listed to investigate the learners’ attitudes towards English learning as well as oral communication in English before receiving the instruction of songs and chants. According to Wragg
(1994), semi-structured interviews are preferred by many classroom researchers because “they raise key questions, but also allow the observer and teacher to have some natural conversation about event” (p. 107). Since the observed students were only third graders, the questions formulated by the researcher beforehand could help the young learners understand where the interview wanted to go.
The researcher started the second part of interview from asking two factual questions regarding the background information of students’ English learning. Then, a few questions followed to understand students’ attitudes toward oral
communicating in English and learning English from songs and chants. These questions were adapted from an action research on using nursery rhymes for remedial teaching (Liao, 2009) and a study on the effects of English song-teaching instruction on English learning attitude of low English achievers (Kuo, 2010). The most relevant ones were modified to serve the research purpose of this study. Since
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the students are very young learners, the questions were presented in the form of simple language with four illustrations in which two happy faces referred to the greatest extent and two sad faces referred to the least extent. Finally, the questions were examined by another experienced English teacher to ensure the appropriateness of this interview.
The second one-on-one semi-structured interview was carried out in January after the songs and chants instruction of Unit Five was completed. This second interview also comprised two parts (see Appendix 5). The oral interview which aimed at evaluating the participant’s possible progress in oral communicative
competence was based on the same criteria as those in the first interview. As for Part B of the semi-structured interview, however, the two questions regarding
background information were eliminated and the rest of the questions were modified to investigate the possible changes of the participant’s attitudes after she received the instruction of songs and chants. To encourage the participant to express her ideas more clearly, the researcher also asked the participant to write down her answers in Chinese as much as she could.
In order to probe how the effects of songs and chants instruction on the participant retained after a period of time, a third interview was carried out in February right after the second semester began (see Appendix 6). The procedures of the oral interview were the same as the preceding ones. As for Part B of the
interview, the questions were different from those in the first and second interviews.
The focus was on the voluntary assignment that the researcher gave the observed class for the winter vacation. The researcher encouraged the students to review what they had learned in the first semester by listening to the CD and completed the self-checklist on page 67 to 68 in the textbook. Since the participant did not receive any extracurricular English instruction, there was no formal instruction in English
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for her during the winter vacation. Therefore, the second part of the interview focused on whether the participant autonomously reviewed the lessons and how the songs and chants she learned in class influenced her English learning during the winter vacation.
The three semi-structured interviews were tabulated below in chronological order: