What Teachers Say When they Write or Talk about Discourse Analysis
WHAT TEACHERS SAY WHEN THEY WRITE ABOUT DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
Compiling the written data
At the onset of the investigation, it was decided to study teachers’ opinions by departing from the usual patterns of tightly controlled answers used in questionnaires. An obvious alternative methodological tool would have been the unstructured face-to-face interview, as it caters for respondents’ openness and individual expression and is, on the whole, more sensitive than questionnaires. However, the difficulties entailed in the method in question, namely interviewer-interviewee bias and the time-consuming process of audio-transcription, limit the number of interviews that can be included in any research.
This research was started, therefore, with a method of data collection which would ensure full-length, naturally-occurring data, resulting from reflection. A series of open-ended questions was devised in which the respondents were asked to provide an evaluation of the two DA modules, bearing in mind their possible influence on four major areas:
a) their knowledge of English;
b) their ability to select and exploit spoken and written texts for TEFL;
c) their ability to choose tasks and activities for EFL learning;
d) their confidence as TEFL practitioners.
The very nature of the task (evaluating a course) called for an analysis of the language of evaluation, that is, “the semantic resources used to negotiate emotions, judgments, and valuations, alongside resources for amplifying and engaging with these evaluations” (Martin, 2000:145). However, the analysis of such resources in lengthy written answers is not devoid of problems. In an attempt to enable patterns to be traced in the data, it was also decided to digitize the texts and probe them with a computer software program.
