2.2.3 Classroom observations
Ellis (1990: 64) stresses that the only way to discover about what and how
children learn at school is to observe them in classrooms. Allwright (1988: xvi)
defines observation as ‘a procedure for keeping a record of classroom events in such a
way that it can be studied’. Thus, in order for the researcher to detect potential
inconsistencies between what teachers believe they do in class and what they actually
do, five teachers were observed for one teaching session with the researcher taking the
role of a ‘non-participant observer’ (Research Methods in Education Handbook 2001:
189). The observations took place after the questionnaires had been collected so that a
comparison could be made between what the questionnaires revealed as a general
trend among teachers and what was actually observed. The observation was based on
an observation scheme as suggested in the literature (see Lightbown and Spada 1999:
102; Richards 2001: 232-235) and consists of three parts (see appendix III, p. 109).
Part A refers to the kind of language the teacher produces (teacher talk) and the way
this affects students’ acquisition. Part B focuses on the types of activities which were
observed, in order to find out whether they are controlled, or communicative. Finally,
part C aims at evaluating the type of interaction which was observed, in order to find
our whether students have an equal role in the classroom discourse, and whether they
are all given the chance to participate.
2.2.4 Interviews
Cohen and Manion (2000: 374) claim that interviews can be used in
conjunction with other research tools in order to confirm or reject hypotheses, or to
form new ones. According to Kerlinger (1970), interviews can help the researcher
expand her understanding of the reasons why respondents gave a particular answer or
behaved in the way they did. Thus, in order to validate the teachers’ responses to the
questionnaire, and to get a deeper insight into their beliefs as well as to understand the
rationale behind some of the practices observed, the researcher asked from each
observed teacher to engage, after observation, in a short semi-structured interview
which, as Bogdan and Biklen (2003: 96) stress, provides the researcher with
comparable data across subjects. According to Merton and Kendall (1946) such
interviews are relatively open-ended, but are focused around particular topics or may
be guided by some general questions. In the interviews under consideration, such
topics are the teaching practices observed and the rationale behind those practices. For
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