D ATA C OLLECTION : I NTERVIEWS

The section describes in detail the recruitment of interviewees and the outline of the interview questions.

3.1.1 Interviewees

In order to investigate how English is conceptualized, the study interviewed 38 persons in Taipei area (Taipei City and New Taipei City). Studies in language

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ideology of English in Taiwan are relatively scarce and studies on language attitudes toward English seldom recruited informants who with relatively limited command in English. To look into how linguistic ownership of English influences language ideology, the study has interviewed both English users and non-English users. Since competence is gradable, it is hardly plausible to define competence and incompetence without a gray area in between. In other words, how competent one can be categorized as a competent English user and how incompetent one is regarded as an incompetent English user are ambiguous. To avoid the gray area, the study recruited informants at the two ends of competence continuum and magnified the informants’

contrasts in terms of their competence in English. English speaking users are defined in this study as those who make a living with their English competence, use English on a daily basis, or score higher than 80 in iBT. On the other hand, non-English users refer to those who do not display any of these three features.

Among the 38 informants, twenty four non-English users and fourteen proficient English users participated in interviews. To gather as diverse information as possible, the study carefully recruited informants of various social backgrounds. The 38 interviewees aged from 19 to 51, with their occupations and education levels varying. Thirty four interviewees are native speakers of either Taiwanese or Chinese.

Four are Hakka, but only three of them speak Hakka with native fluency. To avoid the biased analyses which recruiting informants from my own social networks may result in, informants were asked to bring interviewees unknown to me. By doing so, more different information was obtained due to informants’ different backgrounds. Besides, the participation of both the acquainted and the unacquainted could prevent the awkwardness and unnaturalness that interviewing total strangers may cause. The presence of familiar individuals to both the interviewer and interviewees generate a more relaxed atmosphere and urge other interviewees to open up more. The list of

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interviewees participating in the study is in Appendix 1.

Face-to-face interviews were audio-recorded and notes were taken during interviews. All interviewees were conscious of the presence of the recorder and gave consent to the study to use the information during their interviews. Before each interview began, a free banter was set to diminish interviewees’ anxiety caused by the presence of the recorder and the coming interview. Afterwards, the audio-taped interviews were overviewed again with more notes taken before they were partly transcribed based on the notes. All the interviewees volunteered in interviews and did not receive any monetary rewards for participation.

All the informants were current residence of either Taipei city or New Taipei City when interviews were conducted. Language ideology held by residence in Taipei undoubtedly differs from the counterpart held by residence in other cities. The geographical confinement is surely a limitation of the study.

3.1.2 Interview questions

The total length of the interviews is 24 hours and 18 minutes. The interview contains three sections of questions, personal information, daily use of English, and attitudinal perceptions and conceptualization of English. An outline of the interview questions is in Appendix 2 in both Chinese and English. The three sections of interview questions were repetitively revised during the data collection, so as the ways in how these questions were phrased.

Interviewees completed their personal information in the first section, including ages, occupations, native languages, and language repertoires. The interviewees were also inquired about their self-ascribed English proficiency levels, and standardized English assessments they had taken. Inquiring both self-ascribed competence in

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English and information about standardized assessments is to avoid the following two situations. First, self-ascribed proficiency allowed observations of interviewees’

stances on learning English, as they habitually slipped in evaluative comments on their proficiency such as self-deprecation. The information allows a close-up examination of how English is viewed and how informants evaluate and position themselves with regard to their English competence. Second, it had been expected that some informants, non-English users in particular, may not have taken any proficiency assessments. The information of their proficiency levels would have been possibly left unanswered if interviewees had not self-reported their competence in English. In addition to proficiency levels, informants were also asked to recall their experiences in English learning so as to look into reasons and values of English appropriation in Taiwan.

In the second part, the questions were designed to observe interviewees’ daily contact with English. Interviewees were first inquired to comment on their competence/incompetence in English. Interviewees were asked to recall their experiences of using English, talking to foreigners, and job hunting. The purposes were to both obtain information about English use and scrutinize underlying rationalizations and perceptions of English via the informants’ responses. Take the informants’ narrations of talking to foreigners as an example, the initiative in conversation, code choices, and the initiative in speaking English all index to how English is conceptualized. Job hunting experiences, on the other hand, revealed interviewees’ beliefs of roles which English plays in labor market in Taiwan. This is also the section in which discrepancies between English users and non-English users started to display. Non-English users withdrew and held themselves back to such a great extent that the length of non-English users’ interview in the section was significantly shorter than that of English users’.

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In the last section, the interview questions were directed to acquire information regarding the interviewees’ perceptions and conceptualizations of English.

Open-ended questions concern controversial issues that could evoke deeper discussions. The interviewees were presented one current news article, one announcement from Ministry of Examination and one post from Bulletin Board System (henceforth BBS). Each of the issues presented to the informants contains a set of questions, and the interviewees were asked to elaborate their views on these issues. The goals, however, were not merely to seek whether the informants voted for or against these current issues, but to look into, again, conceptualizations of English.

The news article on November 2, 2011 [Appendix 3] regards the government’s prohibition against cram schools and bilingual kindergartens for pre-school toddlers.

The government was attempting to direct the false emphasis on early start and overlearning in English acquisition. The news hit the headline again in early June, 2012, as the regulation would be enacted in summer 2012 [Appendix 4]. The interviewees were asked whether they argued for or against the new regulation. An extended question is regarding their plans for their kids in terms English education.

During the data collection which lasted for a relatively long span, some informants were presented with the earlier article but some were shown the updated one.

The announcement from Ministry of Examination regards the government’s concern to integrate English into national examinations [Appendix 5]. Due to the length of the official announcement, the main idea was summarized orally during interviews instead.

The BBS thread, taken from the Gossip forum, is a debate originated from a codemixed English word in a Chinese post [Appendix 6]. The codemixed ‘offer’ in the Chinese post was accused of showing off by a person. Irritating a large crowd, the person was soon found out to be a college student through human flesh search. The