2.3.2 Analysis of qualitative data
Qualitative data were yielded from the examination of the supplementary
material teachers said they provide students with, the classroom observations and the
interviews with the teachers. This data was evaluated according to the following
criteria:
Concerning the supplementary material, what was considered important for
the researcher was to see whether it gave students the chance to develop their
communicative abilities by engaging in meaningful and purposeful activities, or it was
used for the practice of isolated, decontextualised items of grammar and vocabulary.
As for the data which was collected from the classroom observations, this helped the
researcher evaluate the effectiveness of the teachers’ practices, with reference to the
literature and compare what the observations revealed as a general picture of
classrooms to that yielded from the teachers’ responses to the questionnaire. Finally,
the analysis of the interviews aimed at revealing whether teachers consciously follow
a particular approach and whether this reflects their own beliefs or it is imposed to
them by factors such as the teaching material or the beliefs of the students and
parents.
During the analysis of the data referred to above, the researcher used the
‘Constant Comparative Method’ which, as Bogdan and Biklen (2003) refer, involves
the looking for key issues, recurrent events or activities in the data in order to discover
relationships. This gave the researcher the chance not only to spot potential
inconsistencies between what teachers believe they do and what they actually do but,
also, to look for common ways of thinking behind similar practices and to try and
shed light to the reasons why teachers adopt similar ways of thinking.
2.4 Limitations to the study
It should be stressed from the beginning that, as this is a small-scale research,
its findings might not be representative of the whole teacher population who works in
primary schools and, therefore, it does not allow for generalizations to be made.
Therefore, its contribution would be rather seen as indicating an area which seems
problematic, and which would need further investigation.
Concerning the methods which vW&RW6VBf