The research site was a large public complete school1 in a suburban area of western Taiwan (pseudonym as Star School). The average years of teaching experience among the twenty junior high school English teachers was 9.1 (with range from 4 to 25 years). The school was selected as the research site because it reflected the phenomenon of the low birth rate in a large size school (Hung, 2011; Lin, 2015; Luo & Shiu, 2012). With new facilities and stable funds from the government, the number of students in Star School remained steady and even increased each year. However, since, 2011, there has been no beginning teacher in Star school. In the past five years, Star school has recruited five English teachers, all of which were experienced teachers from the neighboring school districts that had a surplus. This correlated to the description in Lin’s (2015) report, which stated that while the number of junior high surplus teachers in Taiwan might reach to 10,000 in total during the next five years, large schools acting as the recipients of surplus teachers would be a common phenomenon.
1 In the current school system in Taiwan, complete schools contained both junior and senior high schools. In this study, the research context was the junior high school. Including senior and junior schools, the school has around 95 classes and 3000 students.
3.3 The Participants
Two experienced EFL teachers were invited to be the participants as they shared characteristics that were pertinent to the research needs: sufficient teaching experience, willingness to share their stories, and a positive relationship with the researcher. Both participants had the experience of being homeroom teachers and English class teachers.
They were friendly, had passion in teaching, and loved to interact with students. Moreover, they expressed an interest in the research topic and consented to participate. As the study related to sensitive issues of past and present unpleasant teaching experiences, the participants who were willing to share and were familiar with the researcher could be more likely to maintain trust and cooperation during the research process (Marshall &
Rossman, 2011).
Jessica.
Jessica has shown great interest in English since senior high school. Her parents were both teachers who strongly recommended that their daughter follow in their footsteps. To meet her family expectations and to pursuit her own personal interest, she majored in English at a teacher training university and became a qualified junior high school teacher in northern Taiwan. Although she quit after only one year due to a difficult working environment, the following year she passed the Teacher Screening Test2 and was recruited by Star school. At the time of the study, Jessica had a total of seven years teaching experience. The researcher had more contact with her when they were both homeroom teachers of the seventh graders in 2011. With regular interactions and sharing about life experiences, they became friends and once traveled abroad together.
2 In Taiwan, to obtain teaching positions in elementary and junior high schools, teacher candidates need to attend the screening exams held by the city government and compete with the ones nationwide. For teacher candidates who apply for positions in senior high schools, the tests were held by individual senior high schools.
It is quite competitive as the percentage of passing the recruitment test was as low as 1 to 2 percent (Wang, 2014).
Lisa.
Lisa double majored in Communication and English at a teacher training university.
After graduation, Lisa attended several unsuccessful interviews for positions in journalism, so she decided to be a senior high school teacher. She went back to complete her teaching practicum, and one year later was recruited as a junior high school English teacher at a private complete school. Five years later, she quit the position because she became tired of the hostile atmosphere among her colleagues. In the same year, Lisa passed the Teacher Screening Test and was recruited by a public junior high school in central Taiwan. She transferred to Star School as a surplus teacher in 2011. The researcher maintained a positive work relationship with Lisa as they were usually involved in discussions about teaching during faculty meetings and also shared a common interest in traveling. Two participants’
background information was listed in Table 1.
Table 1
Background Information of the Teacher Participants
Participants Jessica Lisa
Teaching experience 7 years 12 years
Note: Pseudonyms were used to protect the participants’ confidentiality.
3.4 Data Collection
The data collection began from September 2015 to January 2016. To gauge experienced EFL teachers’ experiences, attitudes, and influences of seeking social support, data collection instruments included interviews, participants’ journals, researcher’s reflective journals, and school documentation. Before the data collection proceeded, a
meeting with individual participants was held to prepare for the succeeding procedures. For the duration of the data collection, both semi-structured and informal interviews were conducted to collect the participants’ life stories to answer the research questions. Journals were kept by both the researcher and the participants in order to record experiences and thoughts (Goods and Sikes, 2001). The researcher kept journals of her thoughts and reflection after each data collection and daily encounters with the participants. The participants were suggested to keep monthly journals to reflect on the incidents that occurred every month. All the collected data were further reviewed, coded, and analyzed comparatively.
Meeting before interviews.
The purpose of having a meeting with each participant before the data collection was to collect their background information, familiarize them with the data collection procedures, and identify possible problems beforehand, such as the problems with the recording facilities or the questions discussed. The meeting (see Table 2) began with an introduction to the research purpose and methodology. Following this, the participants were asked to describe themselves and briefly identify their difficulties and source of support before teaching in Star School. It was important that the researcher observed the participants’ ways of thinking and speaking so as to adjust her ways of inquiry. Finally, the researcher arranged the place and date for the following interviews.
Table 2
Meeting Schedule
Name Date Length Place Focus
Jessica 2015/04/17 40mins. School Family background and experiences at school Lisa 2015/07/15 1hr. and 10mins. Restaurant Family background and
experiences at school
Interviews.
According to the life history approach, interviews were the main data collection instrument to elicit rich descriptions of participants’ lives. Two types of interviews, semi-structured interviews and informal interviews, were included. Three semi-structured interviews were conducted with each participant to gauge participants’ experiences of teaching as an EFL teacher. An interview guide (see Appendix B) was developed based on Seidman (2006)’s three interviewing stages, Goodson and Sikes (2001)’s data collection strategy of time-line, research questions of the study, and the researcher’s work experience and prior encounters with the participants. Informal interviews were conducted monthly and the discussion topics covered the current events of the month in order to explore possible issues and to supplement with other data (such as interview data and the participants’ journals). All the interviews were conducted in Chinese. After being transcribed verbatim into interview note (see Appendix C) and returned to the participants to check its accuracy, the transcriptions were translated into English.
Semi-structured interviews.
Three semi-structured interviews were conducted during the school semester in 2015 with the goal to have an overall understanding of the participants’ experience and to respond to the research questions. Following Seidman (2006)’s structure for interviewing in a qualitative research, the semi-structured interviews in this study included three stages, participants’ past experiences, present experiences, and reflections on those experiences for changes and growth (see Table 3) in order to explore the essence of lived experience. An interview guide (see Appendix B) was provided prior to the interviews for both the researcher and the participants, but the length and width of each interview varied by the participants’ responses to the interview questions. It was likely but acceptable to “digress or probe for more information” with the natural flow of conversations (Mackey & Grass, 2005, p. 173).
Table 3
Semi-structured Interviews Schedule
Name Date Length Place Focus
Jessica 2015/07/24 1hr. 9mins. Café Past experience as a beginning teacher 2015/11/26 1hr. Jessica’s home Present experience as an
experienced teacher 2015/12/17 1hr. 30 mins. Jessica’s home Changes and sources of
support Lisa 2015/09/26 1hr. 5mins. Café Past experience as a
beginning teacher 2015/11/07 1hr. 30mins. Restaurant Present experience as an
experienced teacher 2015/12/26 1hr. 40mins. Restaurant Changes and sources of
support Informal interviews.
The purpose of conducting informal interviews was to develop possible issues, confirm the researcher’s understanding about the participants’ journals, and add more descriptions to their informal lives. Conducted approximately once a month, the informal interviews encouraged the participants to talk about their daily lives and to elaborate what they wrote in their participant journals. Similar to natural conversations (Mackey & Gass, 2005), the informal talks occurred during class breaks, daily encounters, or a lunch meeting with the researcher. If the interview setting permitted, the interviews would also be recorded and transcribed for further analysis (See the transcription conventions in Table 4).
Table 4
Transcription Conventions
Symbol Meaning
J Jessica, one of the teacher participants L Lisa, one of the teacher participants R The researcher
( ) Used to indicate overlapping speech; it begins at the point which the overlap occurs
[ ] Used to indicate non-verbal utterances, such as expressions, actions, tone of voice, or sounds
< > Used to add words omitted by the speakers in natural conversations, to make the sentences easier to read
/?/ Unidentified wording due to the problems of the facility or difficult to understand
Note. Adapted from A qualitative research of counselor’s career transition of life’s corner (p. 47), by K. H. Wang, 2004, Taiwan. Unpublished master’s thesis.
Participants’ Journals.
The participants’ journals (see Appendix D) were employed monthly and the participants were asked to write a short paragraph about the difficulties encountered. This encouraged the participants to have a reflective overview of what had happened and allowed the researcher a deeper understanding of the participants’ present experiences of being an experienced EFL teacher (Lewis, Sligo, & Massey, 2005). The content could offer data which might not be observed and discussed during the interviews or daily encounters, thus initiate the discussion questions for the following informal meetings or interviews with the researcher. To cope with its limitations of time-consuming and extra burden for the participants (Goodson & Sikes, 2001; Mackey & Gass, 2005), the participants could use e-mails, Line, or short talks to record their feelings.
Researcher’s Reflective Journals.
The researcher’s reflective journals were conducted to enhance the reconstruction of the collected data and to identify important themes which might not be addressed in other
data collection instruments. The researcher recorded her thoughts, insights, or reflections after conducting each interview, collecting participants’ journals, interacting with the teacher participants at schools, and observing some issues. For instance, after interviews, the researcher wrote down the key points of the interviews, her observations of the participants’ non-verbal signs (such as voices, facial expressions, gestures, or other descriptions of the participants), and her comments or personal experiences in response to the content of the interview (see Appendix E).
School Documentation.
Documents, including school calendar, students’ contact books, and school magazines, were utilized to provide valuable information of the participants’ lives at Star School. For instance, the researcher received both participants’ permission to read the students’ contact books of their class to see how they maintained the relationships with their students and students’ parents. The school calendar and school magazines assisted the researcher in understanding what school activities the participants might be preparing for and arranging the appropriate dates to collect relevant data.
3.5 Data Analysis
The study followed qualitative analytic procedures and constant comparative analysis to analyze the collected data (Creswell, 2012; Marshall & Rossman, 2011). First, the researcher prepared the data for analysis by renaming (see Table 5 for the file names of different sources of the collected data), transcribing, and re-checking its accuracy from the participants. For instance, the first semi-structured interview with Jessica on September 5, 2015 would be titled with “SI-J-01150905.”
Table 5
Symbols of the File Names
Symbol Meaning
1M Meeting before interviews
SI Semi-structured Interviews
II Informal Interviews
PJ Participants’ journals
RJ Researcher’s reflective journals DE Daily encounters with the participants
J Data collected from Jessica
L Data collected from Lisa
Second, the researcher coded the data by reading the text repeatedly, labeling relevant or interesting words or sentences (they were called as “codes”), and categorizing or reducing various codes to identify important themes (Strauss and Corbin, 1998). For example, as Jessica described her experience as a beginning teacher, the researcher underlined several text segments with key phrases as “unsure about how to talk on the stage in the tone of a teacher teaching in class,” “planned to teach for half a class period, but in the end it took only fifteen minutes,” “gave students too many grammar points, most didn’t appear on the test paper,” and “being nervous before every class.” Then, the researcher assigned the codes as “language use,” “time management,” “teaching content,” “confidence in teaching.” Next, after grouping similar codes and reducing overlapping codes, the researcher identified the theme of “unfamiliar with teaching content and contexts.” The coding process was presented in Figure 1 (Creswell, 2012, p. 244).
Initially read Divide the text Label the segments Reduce overlap Collapse codes through into segments of information with and redundancy into themes text data of information codes of codes
Many pages Many segments 30-40 Codes Codes reduced of text of text codes reduced to 20 to 5-7 themes
Figure 1.
The Coding Process
Note. From Educational research : planning, conducting, and evaluating quantitative and qualitative research (p. 244), by J. W. Creswell, 2012, Boston, MA: Pearson. Copyright by Pearson Education.
Third, descriptions and visuals, such as figures, maps, or tables, were used to organize the themes collected from different instruments. By doing so, the researcher could more effectively capture a picture of the collected data. The themes were also organized in time-lines for the researcher to include relevant contextual factors and incidents of the time for further analysis (Goodson and Sikes, 2001; Hong, 2011). For instance, the data from interviews, participants’ journals, and school documentation were used to compile a time-line table to present Jessica’s present challenges (see Table 6).
Last, the topics would gradually emerge by probing into the relevance of the themes to the research questions, including challenges, coping strategies, experience of seeking social support, and personal reflections and improvements after several years of teaching. During this stage, the analyses of themes explained the impact of social support in participants’
lives. The researcher could gradually construct a lived experience in participants’ minds.
Table 6
Jessica’s Present Challenges
Year Date Focus of the data Analysis
2015 Jul. 09 II-Special education student (worried after seeing his records)
1st challenge: Special education students Aug. 31 School begins
Sep. 09 II-Getting pregnant (excited)
11 PJ1-Special education student (frustrated Oct. 01 II1-Difficulties in dealing with special
education student and doubt from parents. Positive attitude to look at the challenge (confident)
2nd challenge:
Teacher-parent communication 13 II-Meet with special student’s mother
16 PJ2 Use LINE to ask cooperation from parents but not quite successful (unhappy)
22 II2-Further express need of cooperation from parents and it works (pleased) Nov. 09 PJ3-Deal with student behavioral
problems (bullying) and heavy workload (upset and tiring)
3rd challenge: Student behavioral problems 13 Sports Day and School Fair
27 School Evaluation 30 SI2-Overall challenges: classroom
management and parents
Dec. 01 II-Special education student’s behavioral problems (breaking school rules and affect other classes) (disturbed) 11 Field Trip
15 PJ4-Better understand special education
student (satisfying) (continued)
17 SI3-Overall challenges2: special education students and discipline
21 School discipline incident (a serious conflict between a school teacher and a parent finally became a news headline)
28 PJ5-Maintain positive attitude toward the unsatisfied parents (respond to the school incident)
2016 Jan. 08 Individualized education programs 18 PJ6-Deal with student interpersonal
problems (perplexed then relieved) 21 Winter vacation begins
28 II-Experience of being a beginning teacher (survive with family support).
Improvements in different aspects.
Note. II = informal interviews or talks; PJ = participants’ journals; SI = semi-structured interviews.
3.6 The Researcher’s Role
The researcher herself is an experienced EFL teacher at Star school. Her understanding and familiarity with the teaching profession could bring biases to the study when she interacted with the participants or dealt with the data. However, her position also enhanced the sensitivity to the discussed issues and brought empathy and comfort to the sharing of the participants (Wang, 2004). For instance, the researcher held positive attitude toward eliciting support from colleagues when facing challenges at school. She also believed in teachers’ good intentions to help students learn and improve during teacher-parent conflicts. To prevent the researcher’s biases from influencing the data collection and analysis, the researcher kept reflective journals to look at the discussed issue from different point of views. Moreover, while the data was mostly collected from the participants, the role of the researcher was of significance. As a data collection instrument in the qualitative study (Creswell, 2003; Marshall & Rossman, 2011; Seidman, 2006), the
researcher needed to carefully address the rights of the participants, including selecting appropriate interview contexts, adopting anonymity, and utilizing sufficient interviewing skills to make the participants more comfortable to talk. With the intention of building a
“trusted and collaborative relationship with the participants” (Wang, 2004, p. 37), the researcher respected the participants for what they had contributed to the study and shared her own stories regarding the challenges and strategies confronted in her teaching lives.
3.7 Trustworthiness
Owing to the qualitative structure of the present study, the source of the collected data relied heavily on the in-depth interviews and lived experiences of the individuals.
Sandelowski (1991) in the study of narrative approaches in qualitative studies noted that
“Narrative truth of narrative is distinguished from other kinds of formal science truths by its emphasis on the life-like, intelligible and plausible story (Sandelowski, 1991, p. 164 ).“ The issue of validity of the qualitative study was significant to be concerned. To enhance the trustworthiness and credibility of this qualitative study, several strategies were employed (Creswell, 2003; Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Mackey & Gass, 2005; Richards, 2014; Shenton, 2004). First, this study adopted multiple measures, including interviews, journals, and school documentation, to elicit rich data and to triangulate the findings from multiple sources (Mackey & Gass, 2005). Next, the researcher engaged in the research setting for a long period of time (more than five months) to better understand the participants’
personalities and behaviors. Also, the in-depth descriptions of the context and the participants would also enhance the transferability of the study. (Mackey & Gass, 2005;
Shenton, 2004). Last, the study utilized member-checking by sharing the collected data with the participants to ensure the accuracy of the transcription and interpretation. After interviews were transcribed, the researcher emailed the transcriptions to the participants, who were able to make changes of the content of transcriptions if their opinions were not clearly expressed.
In sum, the methodology of this qualitative study was designed in order to effectively collect and analyze the experienced EFL teachers’ experiences and thoughts on the social support to overcome their challenges at work. Life history approach (Goodson & Sikes, 2001) and constant comparative analysis (Creswell, 2012; Marshall & Rossman, 2011) were adopted to enhance the elicitation, analysis, and interpretation of the multiple sources of data. The next chapter would further present the research findings.
CHAPTER FOUR FINDINGS
The study aimed to understand the challenges that experienced EFL teachers encountered and how their elicitation of social support impacted their overall teaching lives
The study aimed to understand the challenges that experienced EFL teachers encountered and how their elicitation of social support impacted their overall teaching lives