Qualitative Research Methodology in Online English Learning

This article presents the methodology of a qualitative study investigating social presence and interactivity in online English learning. It discusses the rationale for adopting qualitative research, participant selection, sampling strategies, instrumentation, and the use of grounded theory. The study examines iteration, saturation, criterion sampling, snowball sampling, semi-structured interviews, memo-writing, constant comparative analysis, and the researcher’s role as participant observer. Based on the methodology chapter of a PhD dissertation, the article provides a detailed account of the research design and procedures used in an online English learning context.

Methodology

Rationale for Qualitative Research

Recently, there has been a shift of emphasis from quantitative research to qualitative research when it comes to social sciences, for example SLA (Chapelle, 1997; Greene, 1998; Kirkpatrick, 2005; Leahy, 2008; McKay, 2006; Pessoa, Hendry, Donato, Tucker & Lee, 2007; Richardson & Swan; 2003; Walther, 1996/1997). According to Leahy (2008), when researching advanced language learners in an open task framework, it is difficult to work with a quantitative research paradigm for the following three reasons:

1. The freedom of choice makes the learning path less predictable.
2. It is difficult to define what constitutes an advanced learner and measure quantitatively the added value that an open CALL task of this type may have produced.
3. The variables and the second language (L2) input cannot be fully controlled.

Qualitative Research in Computer-Mediated Learning

According to Hora and Kling (1999, as cited in Kirkpatrick, 2005), “not enough qualitative, student centered work has been done to assess and explore the ramification of computer-mediated teaching and learning strategies” (pp. 145-146). Furthermore, Walther (1992, as cited in Lowenthal, 2009) contends that CALL programs with experimental settings fail to mirror how people interact with various media in the real world because human’s social nature is almost the same in face-to-face and CMC environments. As a consequence, people can find ways to compensate for any nonverbal cues that are not present in CMC, which is technically referred to as Social Information Processing Model (Walther, 1992, as cited in Lowenthal, 2009; Walther, 1997).

On the other hand, Leahy (2008) attempted to find an appropriate answer to this research question “Can qualitative research open a window to a better understanding of what learners actually do while engaged in task-based language learning in the computer room?” (pp. 265-266). The research has indicated that direct engagement with the participants and the subsequent cyclical analysis of the data in a dynamic fashion can be relatively helpful in coming up with reliable theories in the field of CALL.

Characteristics of the Qualitative Research Design

The rationale for employing a qualitative research is that as Mackey and Gass (2005) have stated, this dissertation and any qualitative study share the same characteristics as the following:

1. Providing a careful and detailed description of the phenomenon,
2. Naturally and holistically representing pictures of the phenomena being studied,
3. Interpreting phenomena in terms of the meanings the participants attach to them (emic perspectives),
4. On the bases of a cyclical, process-oriented, open-ended and inductive approaches to data collection and analysis, and
5. General and open-ended research questions and hypotheses

Participants

The participants of this study were 42 online English students (Appendix E) among the 260 active members of the researcher’s weblog at www.LELB.net who attended a general English course in preparation for IELTS and TOEFL with a particular emphasis on organized discussions lasting for over one year. The other 218 members of our community did not participate in our classes. Hence, they were not studied. All of the participants with the exception of four foreigners were Iranians. 13 of our 38 (34.2%) Iranian participants followed our course while they did not live in Iran. 24 of the 42 participants (57.15%) were female and 18 (42.85%) were male English learners in the 18-41 age bracket with the average age of 27, which was calculated from their personal profiles on our online community. Their level of proficiency in English was intermediate and/or above, which was confirmed through an oral evaluation test that each participant was supposed to take before attending our classes in the form of an online interview with the researcher to ascertain whether they had sufficient competence in general English, particularly for our challenging discussions.

Participants’ Academic Background and Study Phases

All of the participants (except A. Ahadzadeh) were either university students or graduates in non-English university majors (with the exception of F. Rezanejad, who was an M.A. graduate in TEFL). The information about the participants’ fields of study was obtained through either our individual interviews prior to our classes or the participants’ biographies in their personal profiles. Almost in the middle of this inquiry, our virtual classes underwent some modifications to the adopted procedure that divided the study into two phases with almost the same participants.

With the purpose of accounting for the homogeneity of the participants in terms of being educated, serious, and at least intermediate in English, the participants were allowed to attend our online courses if they could meet our requirements, such as a reliable internet connection, determination, responsiveness and activeness (e.g., obligatory content development on the part of the students), proficiency level in English (intermediate and/or above), etc.

If a student could not comply with any of the aforementioned requirements, he/she was not permitted to continue attending our online classes. The acid test for the participants’ levels of proficiency and determination was, in effect, the selection of our highly intellectual topics and activities in our English conversation class, particularly our listening comprehension practice (discussed in the Procedure Section) which literally filtered out those participants whose proficiency and determination levels failed to comply with our requirements because if the participants had not been proficient and serious enough, they would not have been able to or enthusiastic about carrying on our intensive classes. This filtering procedure will be discussed in more depth in the section of limitations of the study in this chapter.

Sampling

Sampling in this research was on the premise of two important features: iteration and saturation. Dörnyei (2007) states that “the cyclical process of moving back and forth between data collection and analysis is often referred to as iteration” (p. 126). The iterative and cyclical processes of data collection and data analysis occurring almost concurrently and not necessarily in succession (as it is generally the case in quantitative studies) commenced from the very outset of conducting interviews as the main instrument of data collection in our call for feedback sessions at the end of each virtual class (i.e., from the very beginning of the study) and continued unabated throughout the study until a detailed account of the phenomena under investigation (i.e., social presence and interactivity) was fulfilled (saturation).

According to Glaser and Strauss (1967), in a qualitative research, particularly based on grounded theory, sampling should be a flexible, ongoing and evolving process of selecting successive respondents directed by previous discoveries so that the emerging ideas and theoretical concepts could be tested and refined.

Sampling Strategies

In this regard, the researcher employed two sampling strategies with considerable overlap (Dörnyei, 2007):

1. Criterion Sampling: The researcher selected participants who met some specific predetermined criteria (for instance, level of proficiency in English, academic qualifications and age). According to this sampling procedure, only could the participants whose proficiency level in English was intermediate and/or above attend our online classes so that they could take active roles in our online discussions based on challenging and rather abstract themes and complete our required assignments (e.g., posing appropriate questions to each other, replying to the existing questions, etc.). In reference to the other two criteria (i.e., age and education), our experience showed that technically the students who were young (18 to 41 years of age) and educated could persist in our online courses in English in the long run. With regard to the criterion of education, except A. Ahadzadeh, the other participants had university education, which was either displayed in their profiles or specified in their interviews with the researcher before attending our virtual classes. Our strict regulations and moderately demanding expectations (e.g., challenging themes, the responsibility of creating the content of the course in the form of questions and replies, preparing lectures, etc.) did filter out the other participants who were not proficient and serious enough upon attending our classes for a couple of sessions. The rationale for adopting this criterion sampling based on the age, proficiency level and academic qualifications of the participants lies in the fact that, according to Lee (2004), learners’ language proficiency, computer skills and age differences are linguistically and socially significant in the quality of online negotiation and students’ motivation toward networked collaborative interaction (NCI). Criterion sampling is also referred to as theoretical sampling (Creswell, 2007).

2. Snowball or Chain Sampling: The starting point of this strategy was a principled list of the key participants selected by the researcher through criterion sampling who were asked to recruit further participants with similar characteristics in some respects central to the study (e.g., being educated and proficient enough). In other words, the participants were encouraged to invite their friends to the course if they shared the same characteristics. Through chain sampling, some new participants who were appropriate for this study were introduced to our classes (e.g., Mehri, V. Kalhor & Z. Rousta).

Instrumentation

In order to seek appropriate answers to the research questions, the researcher carried out this study qualitatively because, on the one hand, according to Richardson and Swan (2003), the social essence of the research questions required the researcher to elicit valuable data in the form of open-ended questions at the end of each session in our semi-structured interviews; and on the other hand, the researcher was expected to become involved in the ongoing process of guiding the participants with course materials and corresponding assignments, which was almost impossible to achieve in a quantitative study (Pessoa et al., 2007; Richardson & Swan, 2003).

Rationale for the Qualitative Design

To furnish more information on the researcher’s conscious decision about utilizing a qualitative design for this study, the reader’s attention is kindly called to direct evidence in support of a fairly perfect harmony that exists between the social and integrative essence of this study and the adopted qualitative design for that. For instance, Chapelle (1997) calls for a more descriptive and narrative approach to research in the realm of CALL that focuses on three aspects, the input provided to the learner, the learner’s output, and the interaction that is constructed through the turns consisting of input and output. In another study, Green and Youngs (2001) analyzed both quantitative and qualitative data collection in using the Web for Elementary French and German courses, trying to ascertain that quantitative methods in integrative CALL programs could not be self-contained. In other words, a combination of the two is often more informative than either alone (Hubbard, 2005).

In support of the employment of qualitative research in social sciences focusing on interaction, the pioneers of grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) have declared:

… those field workers who do not really believe in their own hard-won substantive theory are tempted toward a compulsive scientism. Because they do not trust themselves—their own ability to know or reason—they rely in addition upon questionnaires or other objective methods of collecting and analyzing quantified data (p. 227).

Grounded Theory

The employment of grounded theory to carry out this research is rooted in the truly descriptive and theory-generative nature of the study (Corbin & Strauss, 1990/2008; Creswell, 2007; Glaser & Strauss, 1967) in a fairly social and interactive ambiance in which the research was conducted (Charmaz, 2005), and the role of the researcher as both the researcher and the participant observer (Charmaz, 2005; Merriam, 1998).

In this naturalistic inquiry, according to Guba (1981), as opposed to typical experimental designs used by rationalists in which it is attempted to prohibit any change in treatment once the study is under way, grounded theory was employed with an emergent design to unfold multiple realities in interaction with the participants over time, “which is never complete until the inquiry is arbitrarily terminated as time, resources, or other logistical considerations may dictate” (Guba, 1981, p. 79).

Strategies for Establishing Credibility

To give an explanation for the credibility of this qualitative study on the foundation of grounded theory, the researcher implemented the following strategies proposed by Glaser and Strauss (1967) as the pioneers of this type of qualitative research:

· The researcher brought the research to a close through continual intermeshing of data collection and analysis in a cyclical mode. The processes of data collection and data analysis were intertwined. That is to say, the researcher who was both a participant and an observer, used to collect the data and analyze it almost instantaneously. For instance, immediately after each class, the researcher used to listen to the recorded interviews in our call for feedback sessions while taking necessary notes of the most important points.

· Numerous discussions and interviews (talking out) were conducted throughout the study together with memo-writing sessions so that the researcher could be sufficiently immersed in the concept of social presence and its complexities. To be more precise, each virtual class ended with the call for feedback section lasting for approximately five minutes. In this part, the participants were given this chance to express their ideas and feedback freely in the form of semi-structured interviews, which was the main instrument of data collection.

· The researcher planned to get the readers to understand the theoretical framework of the study by giving an extensive abstract presentation of the overall framework and its principal associated theoretical statements, presenting the data evidentially, and indicating how the researcher generated theories from the data (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). To fulfil this objective, the researcher transcribed and analyzed all of the 41 semi-structured interviews in depth (Appendix H). Then he printed the entire document (over 20 single-spaced pages) and scrutinized it line by line to generate or ground valid theories in reference to the research questions.

· The researcher employed the constant comparative method to keep track of his ideas and integrate theories and make sure that categories (units of information) were meaningfully interrelated (Charmaz, 2005; Corbin & Strauss, 1990; Creswell, 2007; Glaser & Strauss, 1967). In this regard, in the discussion section of Chapter 4, the researcher comparatively processed the collected data that had been reported in the results section of the same chapter, cross-checking the units of information or categories on the basis of the research questions and hypotheses. In so doing, he tried his best to objectively quote the participants’ feedback under their own names to avoid any imminent subjectivity.

· The researcher attempted to provide an in-depth analysis of the phenomenon under study (i.e., social presence in online English classes) through a fairly progressive and inductive collection and analysis of the data cyclically (Dörnyei, 2007). In this regard, the researcher acted like a detective, embarking upon the investigation by gathering relevant pieces of information vis-à-vis the research questions and hypotheses with the help of 41 semi-structured interviews. Afterwards, he endeavored to place the pieces of information (likened to the pieces of a puzzle) that were categorized according to the research questions and hypothesis (categories or units of information in grounded theory) to yield reliable findings, allegorically speaking, to solve the puzzle neatly and completely.

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11 This reason is totally in line with my research design as the proficiency level of the participants was above upper-intermediate, and all of the activities and tasks were open-ended in nature.

22 The participants of this study are referred to with their real names with their own previous permission.

33 Further information will be provided in the procedure section.

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